Hard drive problems. Please help me!!!

Ok. This is what I have. I have a Sony VIAO (no hard drive) and a Dell vPro. They both ran windows xp pro. 

I  want to put the Dell hard drive into the Sony. But when I do that, I get nothing. 

So, I just kept my Dell hard drive in the Dell and plugged in my Sony monitor. But now I get NO INPUT on my monitor. 

First is it possible to put the dell hard drive in my Sony?

What am I doing wrong?

To swap hard drives you're gonna have to reinstall windows on the new drive even if it has a copy on it. Xp was set up for the computer the hard drive was originally in, not the one you're switching to. Windows won't recognize the graphic card driver and or cpu.

The monitor driver is probably set for the original monitor. Restarting a couple times hasn't gotten it to recognize it as a default monitor?

reply to post by TheLieWeLive


Ok thanks.

I restarted it a couple times. I'll try that again to see if that works.

Originally posted by Frankenchrist
Ok. This is what I have. I have a Sony VIAO (no hard drive) and a Dell vPro. They both ran windows xp pro. 

I  want to put the Dell hard drive into the Sony. But when I do that, I get nothing. 

So, I just kept my Dell hard drive in the Dell and plugged in my Sony monitor. But now I get NO INPUT on my monitor. 

First is it possible to put the dell hard drive in my Sony?

What am I doing wrong?

Can you put the Dell HDD into the Sony computer? Provided both use standard IDE or SATA connectors, I'd say yes. That aside though, you can't just drop the Dell HDD into the Sony machine and boot into windows. You're probably going to have to install the drive, ensure that it's recognized in BIOS, then format and reinstall windows, followed by driver installation and program re installation.

** MAKE SURE YOU BACKUP ALL YOUR FILES BEFORE STARTING THE STEPS OUTLINED ABOVE **

As far as the NO INPUT message, make sure your video card is seated properly, and make sure that the video cable connected to the back of the computer is fastened securely.

reply to post by Frankenchrist


Editing one more time to simplify it.
Motherboards are tricky.. aka moving one drive to another machine. I've ran into so many problems in regards to the motherboard. If your moving your dell drive to your sony machine you will run into all kinds of problems. You can try and install drivers by looking them up on sony's website and see if you can patch it up. Good luck. Most of the time you will have to reinstall windows on top of it for windows xp to rebuild the registry tree and replace the old drivers to keep the registry less cluttered.

I apologize for posting and editing over and over again.

reply to post by Frankenchrist


As others have said, IF Windows starts the drivers are going to be all over the place.
And thats assuming it has a friendly chipset driver that will work with your onboard monitor.
In a regular PC you can normally get away with getting into safemode, but laptops arent as easy.

Are you sure the drive is plugging in? make sure the 'socket/plug' on both hard drives look the same are in the same spot on the drive. IE Sata socket is on the left hand side of the drive on both HDD's.

when you turn the PC on do you see the black and white writing (this is called POST)

how far do you get with that?

Also, why do you want to swap the drives? Do you think the Dell drive is better thus you want to put it in Sony (or what not)

you could just buy a converter (external HDD Cady) plug in the second hdd into it then plug that into the USB socket.

effectively you then boot from the original HDD in the laptop and have the other one as a secondary drive.

Of course Windows is not designed to be moved around like this. You might get it to work by just putting it in the computer but to be safe you should do some preparation to the system before attempting to move it to new hardware. This process is mostly command line driven though.

If it was me id have downloaded windows AIK and used it to create a windows PE boot disk with imagex installed as an extra using oscdimg.

Then used sysprep with the generalize option to clear out all of the old settings while leaving the installed programs intact.

Then booted off the Pe disk and used image x to create a WIM file of the installation that could be stored on an external drive.

Then id have put the drive in the new computer, booted off PE and used diskpart to clean the drive and create a new partition.

then use imagex to apply the wim file to the clean drive , made it bootable and restart.

Thats how you can swap to another system without having to re-install, plus you keep all of your installed programs. But its not for the faint hearted

Originally posted by TheLieWeLive
To swap hard drives you're gonna have to reinstall windows on the new drive even if it has a copy on it. Xp was set up for the computer the hard drive was originally in, not the one you're switching to. Windows won't recognize the graphic card driver and or cpu.

The monitor driver is probably set for the original monitor. Restarting a couple times hasn't gotten it to recognize it as a default monitor?

edit on 7-10-2012 by TheLieWeLive because: (no reason given)

Exactly !
reinstall another windows on it
it is the only solution

if you dont want to loose the data on it
you can buy a special adaptor to convert the signal to IDE
and boot it up in secondary HD mode on another computer (desktop)

because the laptops hard drives dont have the same amount connectors (pins)
if there is nothing personal on your HD
maybe you can bring it to a IT computer store so they can make a backup for you on a DVD
shouldnt cost more then 10-20$ max for the time it take
if they want to charge you more .. tell them to FO

Also, not to mention that the HD's data is probably protected by NTFS. Dell laptops have bios features that write to the MBR and protect your data even if the HD is pulled from the system and put into another. Hardware is different in each system you wouldn't want to swap anyways without having a fresh install of the OS and a clean formatted HD.