Installed vista AND xp. Something went wrong!

[MrFish]

My little brother got a new computer for his birthday. It's been months now and no one can get the internet to work. We are all kind of computer geeks so if we can't get it to work then there's something wrong.

So this computer comes with a 300gig hd with windows vista on it. I know that windows xp will run the internet so I stick a 19gig (really old, I know!) hd in the computer and stick windows xp on it. This is just to get the internet to work. So I got the hard drive in and I can access both hard drives from the "My Computer" (technical name?). So the first problem I noticed, with 4gig of ram the newly installed windows xp is really slow! Everything leaves a trail it's so slow. I check the ram stick and they are all fine. I then check to make sure the hds aren't getting to hot and there both fine. So then I think it might be the extra hard drive. I've never had this problem with other hard drives but I've never had two operating systems. So I took out the second hard drive and I get this message when I restart-

Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem.

Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware.

Please check the Windows documentation about hardware disk configuration and your hardware reference manuals for additional information.

I've made sure I'm not even trying to load anything from the cd/dvd drive nor is there even anything in there! So it thinks this hd has windows xp and I don't know how to tell it that it's vista. The biggest problem is, we don't have a vista disk. Microsoft is so cheap, and thinks it's ok to charge an extra 100$ for vista and don't even give you a disk! Bas****s!

So what can I do? And why is it going so slow on windows xp?
Any help is really appreciated!

 

[A Cheese Danish]

Well, the reason it was going so slow is probably due to the 19gb hard drive. Depending on the speed. If you formatted with new drive with XP and still had the Vista drive in,
it overwrote that boot record to boot off XP (more than likely)
So it is going to look for the XP drive to boot off of. Without it there, it won't start.
From what you're telling me, that would be the problem. Correct me if I am wrong about how you formatted the drives.

 

[lawson_jl]

MrFish I highly recommend that you take the system to a trusted local non big box computer store. You should have returned the system the moment you had a problem with it, it's probley too late now. I can only start to guess at what was done wrong or what the issue is bad componets, incorrectly connected HDDs, it may not even have Widnows XP drivers since it was a system made for Vista.

It's been months now and no one can get the internet to work. We are all kind of computer geeks so if we can't get it to work then there's something wrong.

That tells me that you (and or the people helping you) aren't quailifed (at least yet) to fix this issue yourself. It's not meant to be a put down just a statement of fact.