Moving to a new hard drive deactivates MS Word, NAV

[Frank J. Lhota]

I currently use a 40 GB hard drive (single FAT32 partition) on my home
computer. I am concerned about running out of disk space, so I bought a
Western Digital 160GB drive. WD provides software for copying your old drive
to the new drive, so I used this software to create one 160GB NTFS
partition. At first I thought that this was great: I now had tons of space
and an NTFS partitition. Then I tried to run MS Word: it came up in
read-only mode, signaling that it was not activated. I tried activating it:
no soap. Repair failed as well. I tried uninstalling Word, hoping that
reinstalling it would fix the problem. Word would not uninstall.

Later I discovered that there was a similar problem with Norton Antivirus.
At this point, I gave up and went back to my old, crowded 40 GB hard drive.

I thought that Windows Product Activation was supposed to be sensitive only
to mutiple hardware changes. Since I was only changing the hard drive, I am
appalled that this is giving me so much trouble. I have upgraded hard drives
several times in the past, and this is the first time that I have had such
difficulty.

Questions:

1. Do I really have to first uninstall all WPA applications before
copying the old hard drive to the new hard drive, then reinstall them on the
new hard drive, in order to get past the product activation problem? I have
all the CD's needed to reinstall, but that still would be a pain.

2. If so, is there a way to identify all the applications that use
product activation?

3. Does transfer wizard help with product activation?

 

[D.Currie]

I currently use a 40 GB hard drive (single FAT32 partition) on my home
computer. I am concerned about running out of disk space, so I bought a
Western Digital 160GB drive. WD provides software for copying your old
drive to the new drive, so I used this software to create one 160GB NTFS
partition. At first I thought that this was great: I now had tons of space
and an NTFS partitition. Then I tried to run MS Word: it came up in
read-only mode, signaling that it was not activated. I tried activating it:
no soap. Repair failed as well. I tried uninstalling Word, hoping that
reinstalling it would fix the problem. Word would not uninstall.

Later I discovered that there was a similar problem with Norton Antivirus.
At this point, I gave up and went back to my old, crowded 40 GB hard
drive.

I thought that Windows Product Activation was supposed to be sensitive
only to mutiple hardware changes. Since I was only changing the hard
drive, I am appalled that this is giving me so much trouble. I have
upgraded hard drives several times in the past, and this is the first time
that I have had such difficulty.

Questions:

1. Do I really have to first uninstall all WPA applications before
copying the old hard drive to the new hard drive, then reinstall them on
the new hard drive, in order to get past the product activation problem? I
have all the CD's needed to reinstall, but that still would be a pain.

2. If so, is there a way to identify all the applications that use
product activation?

3. Does transfer wizard help with product activation?

WPA affects Windows, not applications, although applications may have their
own protection schemes. It sounds more like something went wrong with the
copying process. If it all copied correctly, you should have been able to
access everything exactly as it was before. And the fact that you can't
uninstall also points to a problem with the copying process. I've done it a
number of times using Ghost with no problems from Windows or any of the
other installed applications.

Try copying it again; you've got nothing to lose.