Hardrive Swap

[fly258]

I have a IBM Thinkpad T20 Whichh has a 13.8gb Hardrive running windows 2000.

I have a Dell Lattitude lying around which has a 19.8gb Hardrive in it and is running xp pro.

Is there a certain way of swapping the hardrives over. I've tried turning it off, turned it up side down and did a straight hd swap it went to switch on but wasn't able to boot up the hardrive it just sat there with a blank screen.

Is it even possible i need you answerbank wizards to help me

Many thanks  

[j2buttonsw]

The windows 2000 will almost certainly have an inaccessible boot device error but I am surprised the windows xp one doesn't boot: they are usually quite hardy. I have swapped windows xp installs from totally disparate systems and they work more often than not. The way to do it is swap the drives then boot using the corresponding windows CD and do an OS repair.

[fly258]

Thankyou but how do you and what is an os repair?

[j2buttonsw]

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/Windows/2000/server/reskit/en-us/Default.asp?url=/resources/documentation/windows/2000/server/reskit/en-us/core/fndc_rec_ZTKN.asp Use the emergency disk repair even if you haven't got a ERD.

[stevie21]

Any hard drive that you have will have info on all of the hardware on your laptop so if you swap HD's then it'll expect to find particular makes and models of motherboard, modem etc. and that may be a problem. 

If you were to switch hard drives and then press DEL as your laptop boots (IF you get this far) then you can find an option which says "first boot device".   If you change this to CD then you can reinstall XP (provided you have the disc) and go ahead using the larger HD.