old HDD won't boot

[Comper]

I'm having some trouble with an upgrade I'm doing and hoped I moght get some assistance here.
I noticed that my daughter was using an old 500mb Dell circa 1999 as her computer, and thought that I might be able to upgrade her by using some spare parts I had laying around. I had an AMD Athlon 1600+ and an MSI KN7 Delta board, pus some old DDR Ram that I put together in a spare case. 0Got everything up and running using a spare HDD, then took it over to her place to swap parts. That's when I started to have problems.
Whenever I try to boot up the comp with her old HDD, I get a post, and the BIOS correctly sees the HDD as a primary drive, but when it goes to start Windows (Windows XP, BTW) it pops up a bluescreen that says (in essence) "a problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer." Then it goes on to say things like: "if you've installed a new hard drive, revove it", and " if you've installed a new hard drive, make sure the configuration is correct", etc.
Now, I've tried configuring is as a master drive, used cable select, even tried using the old 40-pin cable (Bios won't allow), and I can't get it to boot. It works fine back in the Dell, and, using my spare HDD as the boot drive in the new system, it will show up as a slave drive with no problems. How can I get this drive to boot without loosing all the data? Can't really afford a new drive at this time, so I would like to get this to work. Any suggestions or ideas?

[glc]

You have to do a Windows repair reinstall. Procedures are in the Tips and Tricks forum.

[Comper]

Thanks... did the trick