Thanks, Paul. Because of peculiar new rail-screw mounting,
I'm reluctant to take it apart to run the HD all alone.
And this new Compaq machine is causing me too many other
headaches. As we say here in Florida, I'm up to my A**
in alligators just getting all my old applications up.

I've saved your advice separately and will
give it serious thought when I come up above water again.
Bill L.

Paul Greeff wrote:
Hi William

Nobody has mentioned using a boot manager in this thread... have you used
anything like that before and have you considered it this time? I use XOSL.

The first thing I would try is to put your old hard drive in the new machine
as the only drive - see if it'll run. I've done similar things in the past
and found that as long as the IDE chipset is the same (or similar enough to
work with the same driver) you can get into Windows and then sort out the
rest of the drivers from there. If the IDE is different, the wheels have
fallen off and don't bother to look for the wheelnuts! That's more of a
headache to get around than reloading from scratch.

XOSL has some nice features. I run Win98 and XP Pro in separate partitions
with a common partition accessible to both for data. Each "profile" can be
set to hide one or more of the other partitions so that there can be no
interferance.

PG

"William B. Lurie" wrote in message
...
Kerry Brown wrote:
DL is right. I assumed you had already done a repair install. If you
haven't
then this is the problem.

http://michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

No, I did no Repair Install. I gather that I should
let it try to boot to the 'not-prepared' drive,
and interrupt it along the way, to do a Repair
Install. Well, I'll read that Stevens article again,
but I was less than enthusiastic about the prospect
of doing it when I studied it before.

My "Plan B" is to make a clone of the new system,
and then all of the BIOS and MBR and stuff will
match. As time goes on, the old back-up clones
have less and less likelihood of ever being needed.