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Thread ID: 92962 2008-08-29 09:33:00 swapping hard drive bpt2 (6653) Press F1
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701272 2008-08-29 09:33:00 I want to swap harddrives between 2 different PCs. Both hardd drives have Win XP installed, one is 40GB the other 80Gb.
I get the error message NTLDR is missing, press any key to restart. What is the easiest way to deal with this?
bpt2 (6653)
701273 2008-08-29 09:42:00 This (support.microsoft.com)

Altho its not a good idea, swapping hdd's, if both dont have the info on them for the hardware, that was on the mobo

You'll probably have to do a repair if the mobo's weren't the same model/brand. And had different hardware

Unless its trying to boot from a USB flash drive or floppy, which doesnt have dos on it / theyre not bootable. Remove them.

And make sure the bootdisk in the BIOS is the hdd
Speedy Gonzales (78)
701274 2008-08-29 09:44:00 A repair with the Win XP disk? bpt2 (6653)
701275 2008-08-29 09:47:00 Yup or if a floppy or usb flash drive is still connected / in the disk drive, remove it Speedy Gonzales (78)
701276 2008-08-29 09:50:00 You should be leaving the OS on the machine it was installed on.

You are likely to get a lot more errors if you just put one hdd with the system installed on to a different machine

What you should be doing is to image the hdd and then write it on the drive you are replacing it with.

So if you want to swap both computers HDD's - then you would image both HDD's and write the image on to the opposite HDD's.

So the OS stays on the same computer, only the drives are different
bevy121 (117)
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