Windows XP pro upgrade: ridiculously horrible

[cornelius]

I upgraded 98se to XP pro. It took me a few tries to get it working, but it finally did. Basically, I had to make sure that the installer DID NOT update the setup software/program at any time during the process. Whenever it did try to update the setup it would hang or reboot, or give me those wonderful little ms errors that say

blah blah blah read this to find out what's wrong:
000000000030300400x000r0f0004000f000x

or whathave you. like I'm supposed to know what the hell that means. anyways, after I actually got the installer to work, I didn't have any problems with XP, cept having to upgrade some drivers, and of course,
when I move the HD to a new machine, windows decided to completly fuck it over, and now I've got a thirty gig hard drive with all sorts of info on it that I can't get too, and I don't want to format it, in case I can actually get the data back. bastards.