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Old August 22nd, 2007, 02:20 AM
tuboysdad tuboysdad is offline
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One Hard Drive. . 2 laptops

Ok Techies, here you go. In my quest to ressurrect an old Dell Inspiron 3800, I've run into this issue. I also have an old Gateway laptop but the screen is broken. I can hook it up to an external monitor and it works fine. Here is my dilemma. The old hard drive in the Dell died. I got a new one and upgraded from a 6 gb to a 30 gb drive. I had replaced the CD ROM in the Dell a while ago but it is not working well so using it to boot from was an issue. I took the new hard drive and found that it also fit in the old gateway. So I used it to load Win 2K pro on the hard drive and then transferred it to the old Dell. This actually worked and I was able to get it working and functional. The problem. . .the new hard drive had some bad sectors and it kept freezing on me to the point where I had to hard boot. . once it froze I was stuck.

I took the old hard drive from the gateway (another 6gb), formatted it and loaded Win XP. Tried to transfer it to the Dell. . .but no go. It wanted to boot and never actually gave me a message that it couldn't find a drive to boot from, but once it posted, it didn't do anything else. It worked fine in the Gateway but wouldn't boot in the Dell.

The company I purchased the 30gb hard drive from replaced the bad one and I have to go through this again. I would like to load XP but with it not being able to boot on the old hd I'm going to go with Win 2k again. I can always try to upgrade it later.. once I replace the cd drive.

Has anyone ever tried to switch hard drives that fit in 2 laptops and boot successfully. Again, Win 2K worked, XP did not.

Thanks!!
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Old August 22nd, 2007, 03:59 AM
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Murf Murf is offline
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Welcome to CTH

Earlier versions of Windows, yes you can. Starting with XP you cannot (unless you are really computer savy and it takes a lot of work), it is due to a file called hal.dll. (Hardware Abstraction Layer).

The file hal.dll, is required for windows to operate. It is used by windows when communicating with your computer's harware. It acts as a translator between windows and your hardware, so that the same windows 'commands' can be executed on hardware manufactured by a variety of different vendors. If hal.dll is unavailable, windows will not function correctly.

If you cannot boot from the CDROM, then the way you did it will work, or find an external cdrom.
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Old August 22nd, 2007, 02:47 PM
tuboysdad tuboysdad is offline
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Thanks Murf. That makes total sense now and I'm glad you could explain it to me.
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