Boot Failure / BSOD

[4breezes]

Now that the holidays are winding down and the excitement is ebbing, maybe I can get back to this.

I have System A, the old tower with the newer HD running XP MCE. That system will not boot into windows. I have System B, the backup tower with the older HD running W2K. System B boots without problem.

I've now burned a copy of UBCD 5 (RC I believe). It will boot System A, the problem system, and perform diagnostics. The simple fact that UBCD5 will boot the problem system would seem to rule out certain problems with that system. What would that fact rule out? Might it mean that the motherboard is okay? The HD in that system is a 'known good' HD, running XP.

The RAM in both systems tests good.

To recap: System A will not boot with either HD, but will boot with UBCD5. System B will boot from both HDs, but will not boot from UBCD5. What critical thing am I missing about system A?

Hope you all had a good holiday.

[Train]

Bad ribbons is a possible trouble point that comes to mind.

Destroyed a few in the last 10 years myself by pulling on them wrong.

[Rocketmech]

A bad cable would be my first check as well.
Have you rechecked how all the drives are jumpered and cabled?
What do you mean by "not booting" ? Does the pc startup and POST but wont load Windows? Windows doesn't like it when you move it from on pc to another.

[4breezes]

I changed out the ribbon cable to the hard drive. No difference. This system now has only one hard drive, with no jumpers, and therefore master. That's cabled into IDE 1 on a Promise ATE100 card (I think that's the designation) . There is a DVD player/reader on IDE 2 of the same Promise card.

The system posts okay, I think. I get a single beep, it checks memory, it detects the hard drive. Then it has a screen which says something like, "Sorry for the inconvenience..." and gives me a choice of 3 flavors of safe mode, last known good configuration, and booting into regular windows.

Any choice involving safe mode stalls while reading drivers. Last known good config goes immediately to a blank screen, and stays there. Booting into regular windows gives a 30 second countdown, and then just sits at "0".

This hard drive has XP-MCE. The system meets the minimum requirements for XP. This hard drive would boot on the other system. Here it doesn't even tell me that it's found new hardware or wants additional drivers.

[Train]

The system meets the minimum requirements for XP. This hard drive would boot on the other system.

It will take a repair install to get things straightened out as the drivers have changed.