Formatting a Laptop HDD
 

This isn't a Linux based question.. but you are the cleverest people I know... so here goes..

I recently purchased a new laptop HDD (today).. but my laptop doesn't have a CD-ROM/Floppy (has them but not working).. So I used this little peice of hardware to convert my laptop hdd so it would fit in my desktop... so anyway I went ahead with formatting the hdd on my desktop, Then installed Windows XP.. when it was all done.. I removed teh HDD from my desktop and replaced it in my laptop... but now when I boot the laptop I just get a blank screen with a flashing _ that's all... it gets past the BIOS bootup but then Windows isn't booting.. I was just wondering if anyone knew anything I could do about this =(!

call Microsoft...

you said you installed xp to it from the desktop?

if so various things are wrong,
1. windows xp thinks it's on a different drive, so the loading program can't find anything,
2. there is no loading program because xp may not have installed it on that drive,
3. xp is setup for the wrong hardware profile

do you get any prompts at all, or just a bios prompt, then a blank screen?

(if you remove xp and installl lin it will work)

Put that hdd back in the desktop, copy the XP cd to it for installation, copy a bootable floppy onto the hdd and edit your autoexec.bat/config.sys so that it looks of that drive for the needed boot files instead of the floppy. I had to do this once for a computer that needed a new OS but only had either the floppy or the cd rom. Pain and I forget the details but that's what I did. Check out the autoexec.bat and config.sys files or post them here and I'll see what I can remember. It's not too big of a problem though.

**edit** - actually, the only difference is that I had to install 98 so it's possible that XP could be a little more difficult. What command are you using to format the drive?