How do I move HDD/XP Home OS from old E-machines Celeron PC to new Barebones build?

[DFox]

Couldn't find anything like this in the other posts, so hope I'm not repeating. Here goes:

Old PC is E-machines Celeron processor with the basics. Came with Windows 98 SE and I upgraded to XP Home from retail box.

Bought and built new barebones kit w/ AMD Phenom and ASUS M2N-SLI M/B. Bios checks out and hareware looks good (everything recognized). Would like to move HDD/OS to new computer (old one probably headed for scrap heap but still works). You gotta know I've tried and it won't boot, which I figured it wouldn't because of the radically different hardware. Is there anything I can do to OS before the move (again) that will make it open to loading up and recognizing the new configuration and at least asking for the driver disks? Really don't want to loose all the data on the HDD (years of personal accumulation). Can't wait to use the new blazing speed but can't afford new 64 bit OS yet. I have extra HDD's (for experimenting) if that would be helpful to suggestions. Thanks for tolerating my ignorance! God bless.

[photolady]

Install the old harddrive and if your xp home edition cd is a standalone, do a repair install of it using the intructions below in the link.

Repair XP

[DFox]

I should have been more specific, sorry. My XP Home is a retail box upgrade version, not stand alone. Thanks for the suggestion. I'll keep trying.

[photolady]

Retail version is standalone. I meant if you didn't have a recovery disk that comes with branded computers.

[DFox]

Gotcha. Thank you. I'll give it a try.

[DFox]

Get past P.O.S.T. then get message: "NTLDR is missing. Press CTRL-ALT-DEL to restart." I can boot to DOS prompt using 6 disk set. Any other advice?

[GretaP]

DFox,

Get past P.O.S.T. then get message: "NTLDR is missing. Press CTRL-ALT-DEL to restart."

Are you receiving this error after performing the repair install?

[DFox]

Haven't tried yet, I'm working on that today. I tried some of the suggestions in the instructions for repair install at Photolady's link but none of them worked. Kept getting "Access denied" when I tried to modify/delete the files listed.

[photolady]

How are you trying to repair xp? Are you booting up after changing boot priority via setup to cdrom as first boot device? You can't run xp repair while in windows.

[GretaP]

I tried some of the suggestions in the instructions for repair install at Photolady's link but none of them worked. Kept getting "Access denied" when I tried to modify/delete the files listed.

What files that are listed? You don't have to modify/delete files to perform a repair install.

[DFox]

SUCCESS!!!!!!!!! Thank you ladies, you are angels from heaven. Thank you Photolady for the link to the repair install procedure. And thank you GretaP for asking me questions that got me over being reluctant to repair the XP installation. The files I was referring to were in the "Warning" sections of the repair procedure. If you check it out you'll see what I mean (boot.ini and bootcfg manipulations, etc.). These were recommended by an MS-MVP.

Anyway, here is my final indications and the fix:
I couldn't boot from the XP cd in the CD-ROM drive. Couldn't even get a blue screen - don't know why.
Downloaded the software (from this site, thanks fellas) and made a 6 disk floppy XP Setup Boot series.
Got to the blue "Windows Setup" screen, put my XP CD in the cd-rom drive and hit enter.
About 30 mins. later, (or less, this Phenom CPU and Twin-X ram are awesome!!) I was at my login screen grinnin' from ear to ear.
Many tweaks later and I'm up and runnin'! All data, programs, files intact. If you have any questions about specifics just let me know, I'll try and remember the details.
Again, thank you. I've been working on this since the first of April.
God bless!!

[GretaP]

You're welcome