Trying to change system drive

I have an old Pavilion 510c I'm trying to get running. It has two HDDs. The current system drive is failing, but the secondary is good.

I don't have an installation CD (and not really worth acquiring for this), but I was able to install Windows on the secondary drive via the primary. When I remove the old primary drive and replace it with the old secondary though, it won't boot.

I'm assuming this is because there is some sort of boot manager that is only present on the old primary. Is there a way to move this over, or some other way to make the secondary drive usable independently?

Thanks for any help, and please let me know if anymore details are needed, it's been a looong time since I've used XP.

 

Maybe the bios has not saved the disk change. You can enter to the BIOS pressing the key supr or F10 and set the configuration

 

The Partition should be made active. Use a partition utility.

 

Reset the BIOS between each major change, and made the partition active, and a thousand other things, then decided to just start from the beginning again.
Loaded the installation files on the original primary, used those to install onto the other drive. Move NTLDR and NTDETECT over, made a boot.ini file. Then used a hex editor to mark the MBR as bootable... and it works!

 

If it's old and IDE drives you dident really Say? But did you put the little jumper to master?

 

You said you installed XP from the other hard drive. How did you do that? Did you just copy all the files over ? I don't think it can boot that way. I think the best way is to clone it.

Maybe you can use this software to clone it:
https://www.aomeitech.com/pa/standard.html

It says the free version can clone hard drives