XP boot up problem

I recently got a new hard drive, and put it in and
installed it. all was working well I could boot off my
old HD(C and mt new HD(h i was getting rid of the
old one, so used partition magic 7 to erase it, and set
my new one to active. once it did that after the restart
I got the NTLDR missing error, so I used the recovery
console and put that file in, than I got an error message
saying that the boot.ini file was invalid, i searched my
computer for it and found one in the partitionmagic file,
so i pasted it to the h: than when I restarted it goes
throught the splash screen and than moves to the light
blue screen where on my other computer it says "welcome",
and than windows pops up a few seconds later, but on my
new HD it says "windows xp" and just sits there theres a
little HD activity at first, and than nothing, i can
still move the mouse around, but nothing else happens.
any help would be greatly appreciated. you can reply
here, or email me at [email protected].

Ouch

You my friend have hosed your XP I am afraid, you should have used a "drive imaging" software to copy your old drive to your new one, like Ghost or Drive image.
You may try to repair it but I feel that you will have to reinstall XP.

Good luck
Rick
Fold@home Team 32

When I did the new drive, I did a fresh install, and than just deleted the old one. wanted to start form scratch. . .Never copied a drive. . could that still be the problem?

ok if you installed XP while your old "C:" drive was still "C:" and installed XP on the new Drive which you said was "H:" well XP still is trying to boot from the H: drive and there isn't one.
What you need to do is install the new drive by itself and then install XP, then later you can add your old drive back to use for storage if you want.
That would be the easist solution, without going into alot of detail of why your current install will not boot.
Take a peak at boot.ini and you will see what I mean.

Cheers
Rick

Thanks for the info, I don't have my old drive anymore, and didn't have something to back up all my stuff to had abou 50gb of junk(i'm a packrat), but than realized i could back it all up to my roomates drive while i reinstlled, so starting the back up today, and tomorrow will do a reinstall and i should be good again thanks for the input, I didn't know that I shoulda taken my old HD off before i put the new one on, thought I could just swap it out later