Stubborn Hard drive

Well I just finished getting a fresh copy of Win XP Home, and I just installed it on my hard drive, in system 1. I then placed the hard drive in system 2, and low and behold, it will not start up. I restart, mess with bios; the usual. Now I get a thing after BIOS loads that wants me to continue with Safe mode, Safe mode with networking, or with command prompt, Last good configuration, or start windows normally. Try any of them and none work. They either leave me with a blank ugly black screen, or with one of the safe modes, it loads all the system files, but then stops and wont go any further.

Any ideas?

In order to get windows home to work on system 2 you would have to install it on system 2 you can't install windows on one system then take out the Harddrive and put it into another machine and have it work.

Damn...Well thank you very much. What do you suggest I do? Low level format with PowerMax from Maxtor, or just pop the Win XP CD in and reinstall?

If you have time to kill then you could wipe the drive or you could just reinstall it if you are in a hurry to get the box up and running.

Go buy another copy of XP...if you don't the activation is gonna screw you in 30 days. M$ doesn't want you to install a single copy on multiple systems.

I already activated the Win XP.

The point is, you can only activate XP on one system....the hash it sends to MS to initiate activation includes hardware details as a means to keep you from installing it on multiple systems. While there are "tools" to bypass this, I still reccommend that you just break down and get another copy for your second system.