I had Windows 95 running in computer A and Debian Woody running in computer B. I took the Debian hard drive out of computer B and replaced it with the Windows 95 hard drive. But for some reason the computer won’t boot up. Can anyone think of a reason why it won’t boot from the Windows hard drive? Would there be something in the BIOS settings I need to change perhaps?

If I put a Windows 95 startup floppy into the floppy drive it gets as far as an A prompt and then stops, waiting for me to put in a command. What command should I put in to move things on from that point?

Does Computer A have the hard drive set as a boot device? I know it's a stupid question, but it might of been reset or something.

Are all the ribbon cables securely seated? Are all the power cables connected? Is the drive jumpered correctly? Did you try getting into BIOS to make certain that the new drive is correctly identified, and if not, did you rescan it? I will guess that there is some small but important hardware issue here. Good luck with it -- J.W.

The drive you are using now has drivers for the other computer. Unless they are identical models, you would be better off wiping the drive and re-installing windows.

Thanks Ryan0rZ, J.W. and Jschiwal, I’ll check out your suggestions and see what happens.

I solved the problem thanks to your combined advice. This is what I did, and it worked. I replaced the ide cable with another one in case it was faulty, and checked that the power cable was securely in place. I pressed the reset button, and I did an autodetect on the hard drive, which successfully put correct information about the Windows hard drive into the settings.

The problem appears to have been that the computer did not automatically detect the new hard drive (the one with Windows) when I put it in and started the computer - it kept its settings for the Debian drive I had taken out, so I had to delete the old setting and get it to autodetect the new one which it did successfully. Thanks all!