XP, let go of my old hard disk!

[Inspector J Lee]

Hello,

I just bought a new Western Digital 40GB hard disk to replace my 5-year-old
C drive. I used PartitionMagic to clone the drive and then made it an active
drive. I then swapped the cables out so the new drive is in the master
position on the cable and the old drive is on another IDE connection running
thru a raid controller (in non-raid state) on the motherboard. I did all
this to free up an ATAPI spot to install a DVD player. The screwy thing is
the XP operating system won't allow me to remove the old hard disk
completely. It gives me an error about not being able to confirm the
registration before it even loads Windows. It does this no matter where I
put the new drive. Apparently something failed to copy, but what? This is
fine for now, but if the old drive goes south at some point, I'm dead in the
water. How do I transfer the validation from the old C drive to the new
(still) G drive? I also have Norton Ghost 2002 available and I haven't yet
renamed the new G drive to C (scared it will deep six the whole system). Any
clues on how to proceed? i DO NOT want to reformat anything!

Thanks.

Steve Franklin


--
Lian Li PC68 case
Soyo P4S (SiS 645) Dragon Ultra main board
1.5 GHz Pentium 4 processor
2x256 MB Crucial PC2100 DIMM DDR RAM
Enermax 350 W power supply
Western Digital AC36400L 6 GB hard disk
Western Digital WD1200JB 120 GB, 8 MB cache hard disk
Matrox Millennium P750 video card
Creative Soundblaster AudioPCI sound card
(attached to Kenwood stereo receiver and
JBL 4313B Control Monitors
Sony CRX220A1 52X CD-R/RW drive
SIIG USB 5-Port PCI
Zoom External V.92 Voice Faxmodem
Sony SDM-S81 TFT LCD Monitor
Windows XP Home Edition

 

[Michael Cecil]

Hello,

I just bought a new Western Digital 40GB hard disk to replace my 5-year-old
C drive. I used PartitionMagic to clone the drive and then made it an active
drive. I then swapped the cables out so the new drive is in the master
position on the cable and the old drive is on another IDE connection running
thru a raid controller (in non-raid state) on the motherboard. I did all
this to free up an ATAPI spot to install a DVD player. The screwy thing is
the XP operating system won't allow me to remove the old hard disk
completely. It gives me an error about not being able to confirm the
registration before it even loads Windows. It does this no matter where I
put the new drive. Apparently something failed to copy, but what? This is
fine for now, but if the old drive goes south at some point, I'm dead in the
water. How do I transfer the validation from the old C drive to the new
(still) G drive? I also have Norton Ghost 2002 available and I haven't yet
renamed the new G drive to C (scared it will deep six the whole system). Any
clues on how to proceed? i DO NOT want to reformat anything!

Do it again - copy the old drive to the new drive using Partition
Magic, or Ghost. However this time, do not connect the old drive to
the system when you boot up.