Hard drive boot issue

[Noah kuykendall]

I removed an additional hard drive that my friends had put into my computer, and when I tried to boot it back it gives me a message saying "reboot and select proper boot device, or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key" so I decided to put the hard drive back in to see if it would fix the problem, and now it tries to boot with Windows XP, when I had previously been running Windows 8.1. also, it doesn't get all the way through with the boot. The windows XP boot screen just pops up, an error message on a blue screen flashes one far too fast for me to understand what it says, and then just fits this saccharin. if anyone could help me out, that would be lovely considering its rather urgent

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Welcome to Tom's Hardware, @Noah!

I'd recommend you check your BIOS settings and make sure you have set the boot priority properly to the HDD that contains your installed Windows version. You won't be able to boot into Windows XP that is owned by another system/computer. The OS is tied to the motherboard. Once you get into the correct Windows version, check your Disk Management . If you don't need the Windows XP installation, I'd recommend you re-format the HDD and set it up as a secondary drive. However, I'd advise you to check the health and SMART status of the HDD using its manufacturer's brand-specific diagnostic utility , since its a used drive. Make sure that the SMART attributes show no errors, otherwise I'd not trust any essential data with it.

Keep me posted if you encounter further issues & have more questions!
SuperSoph_WD