I am having an issue with second SATA drive not LOADING as master. Quick background - I have a dell xps 400 that has some minor upgrades (RAM, power supply, graphics). It recently wouldn't turn on. I experienced a similar problem in the past and replaced the power supply and everything was fine. I purchased a new Rocket Fish gaming p/s and installed it. Still no power. After some investigating I determined the motherboard was damaged/inop. I happened to have an OLDER MPC at home, so out of curiosity, I installed the new p/s, extra RAM and SATA drive from the Dell to the MPC. It fired right up and worked fine. It booted from the MPC hard drive, so I set the Dell h/d to master in system setup. When i rebooted with the Dell drive as master, it goes immediately from MPC splash screen to BSOD stop error. I installed the pin jumper from the Dell drive to the MPC drive and same result. When I boot from the MPC drive, I can ACCESS all data on the Dell drive no problem so I'm sure the drive is fine and the BIOS recognizes both drives, but I want to boot from the Dell drive as it has a newer o/s (XP Media Center vs XP pro), and it's an inconvenience to bounce back and forth. Is this a partition problem, DUAL o/s problem, or something else?? Thanks for any ideas.The answer: Something else.

Your Dell drive will not boot in that computer. Transferring a drive with Windows on it from one computer to the other generally doesn't work. You are likely to run into a number of problems, as is your case, plus another problem you haven't encountered yet but potentially might.

The other problem you will have if you do manage to get it to boot is that if that OS came with the Dell PC, when it boots it will notice a significant hardware change and require you to reactivate Windows. Trouble is, the Windows license that came with that Dell won't be valid for the "new" system and activation will likely be rejected. There's nothing, legally anyway, you can do about that. This also means we can't really help you make that work since bypassing licensing and such is not allowed here.

If you want help getting the old system working again on the other hand, I'm sure someone can help with that.Would the best option be to replace the dell motherboard then?Do you have the exact motherboard model?
Is it this?
DELL Dimension 9150 9100 Motherboard

They are expensive new, but used without the CPU you can find for about $100 on eBay.
This is not an endorsement for ebay.Instead of replacing the Dell mobo, you could USE the Dell HD(but not the OEM disc) for a dual boot in which you need to order another set of WinCDs or instead just use it as a back up hard drive.