computer gods help plz!!

[snowy]

hello,

where to start.... about a month ago, i was on my old computer and decided to play around with Windows booting screen... i used the program recommended by wincustomize.com... from what i can remember... it worked perfectly...

forward in time, i have moving decided to throw away the old computer but keeping the hard drive because there are important docs on it...

the hard drive itself is quite old as well 6 gigs with 5 gig, 1 gig partition with about 700 megs left on the 5 gig (system and doc files), 1 gig mp3s porn etc...

forward to now, i'm trying to plug the old hard drive on to a much better and newer computer..

when i set the old hdd as slave? (the main booting up thingy - sorry as i'm not sure of exact jargon), i see the boot up screen (where the windows xp screen loading comes up) with my previously changed skin,... but then, it restarts again... repeats this process over and over again...

so, i set the old hdd as secondary and try and read the documents on the old C drive after booting up with the new hard drive.. i can access all the folders except 'my documents"... this is probably due to me having a password on the old hdd (windows login)... when i right click > properties, it shows as having 0 megs (which isnt true)


so the question is,
firstly, how can i fix this??
secondly, if the problem is with the booting screen skin, i deleted the folder with the program from the old hdd ( thinking it would solve the problem and revert back to the old skin but it didnt do anything). How can i change the registry to revert back to the old settings?
if that isnt the problem, is it problem with the old hdd and the new computer hard ware conflicts? how can i solve this problem?

thirdly, it would be much easier if there was a way to access the old hard drives material from the new hdd but as explained above, i cant access ( comes up with an "access error")

both are running windows xp, the old hdd service pack 1, the newer service pack 2...


i'm stumped, googled, asked jeeves, read on computer support forums but no avail...

thanks in advance...
^^;;

oh and i'm a complete computer newbie so no jargon please..

edit - i also did this

i've managed to run some comands to fix the old registry using Repair... like commands such as

md tmp
copy C:\windows\system32\config\system C:\windows\tmp\system.bak
copy C:\windows\system32\config\software C:\windows\tmp\software.bak
copy C:\windows\system32\config\sam C:\windows\tmp\sam.bak
copy C:\windows\system32\config\security C:\windows\tmp\security.bak
copy C:\windows\system32\config\default C:\windows\tmp\default.bak
delete C:\windows\system32\config\system
delete C:\windows\system32\config\software
delete C:\windows\system32\config\Sam
delete C:\windows\system32\config\security
delete C:\windows\system32\config\default
copy C:\windows\repair\system C:\windows\system32\config\system
copy C:\windows\repair\software C:\windows\system32\config\software
copy C:\windows\repair\sam C:\windows\system32\config\sam
copy C:\windows\repair\security C:\windows\system32\config\security
copy C:\windows\repair\default C:\windows\system32\config\default


and exited... i believe it has fixed the booting screen thingy.. but still it keeps restarting as soon as the "windows starting" page...

what can i do?? !!!!!

also what exactly is the "Click of Death" i read about here? when hdd makes clicks and die... how, why hdd does this? is the hdd fixable after this and dies?

[originel]

Your problems are unrelated to the boot screen.

when i set the old hdd as slave? (the main booting up thingy - sorry as i'm not sure of exact jargon), i see the boot up screen (where the windows xp screen loading comes up) with my previously changed skin,... but then, it restarts again... repeats this process over and over again...

The reason is because the old hard drive windows installation was configured for the old system's motherboard chipset. The one of the things windows does when it starts is load the chipset drivers...so it crashes

so, i set the old hdd as secondary and try and read the documents on the old C drive after booting up with the new hard drive.. i can access all the folders except 'my documents"... this is probably due to me having a password on the old hdd (windows login)... when i right click > properties, it shows as having 0 megs (which isnt true)

That sounds like the folder is corrupted to me, not a password issue (but i'm not certain). AFAIK windows does not restrict access to my documents by default. Do you remember restricting access to it yourself?

also what exactly is the "Click of Death" i read about here? when hdd makes clicks and die... how, why hdd does this? is the hdd fixable after this and dies?

It means your hard drive has a problem where stuff is touching that shouldn't be...data is almost never recoverable and it can't be fixed unless you take it to a data recovery place (they charge lots and lots and you just get the data...the hard drive is ruined).

When you ran all of those commands, what else did you do? those commands seem rather incomplete and don't do anything by themselves (and should give errors).

My overall opinion is that the hard drive is crashing, which is why you can't access certain folders/files.

[Fr4gm4n]

Opening old account folders that was password protected! thread should help you with your access problem.

Steve.