Activating ACPI without reinstalling XP?

[mx.2000]

Hello!

I bought a new PC about half a year ago, and I just took the harddisk
with XP pro installed from the old machine and put it in the new one.
Worked surprisingly well.

Well, turns out that old PC didn't support ACPI, and now (on the new
PC) I can't switch to ACPI mode in Device Manager/Computer/Update
Drivers. (The only option available is Standard-PC)

After some googling I found this:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315341/EN-US/

Is there any other way to activate ACPI than performing a complete
re-install? I've seen to many XP installs fail this week to try this on
a running system if there's any other way.
Any Ideas?

Regards,
Martin

 

[Yves Leclerc]

You will still need to do a XP repair re-install. Since you have changed
the motherboard, the XP Product Activation will need to be reset so that the
activation can be done. The easiest way is to do a re-install of XP over
top of your installed version. However, if you have SP2 installed, you
should "slipstream" SP2 in order to create a newer XP install CD. If you
have problems in "slipstreaming" SP2, look at the utility 'AutoStreamer'.

 

[frodo]

You will still need to do a XP repair re-install.

Yup, that's true.

AND, if it's an AMD-based motherboard, be sure to check the bios and make
sure that the APIC option (not ACPI, but APIC) is enabled. [if there is
an APIC option available; this legacy setting is slowly disappearing,
thankfully]. This option controls whether you can have more than 16
levels of interrupt; it must be enabled before the XP setup will install
the ACPI HAL.

 

[mx.2000]

Thanks for your advice!

I did the reinstall with the slipstreamed CD, didn't cause any trouble.

The HAL has changed, but only to MPS-Uniprocessor-PC, which means that
APIC works but ACPI doesn't (if I am reading this
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;309283
correctly).

It is a Socket939-mainboard (Athlon64), so it should be ACPI-ready. Any
ideas on what caused this failure or where to find out?

Regards,
Martin

 

[mx.2000]

Nothing new on the second try.

So I tried to play it safe and made an extra partition for a
test-install. WinXP installs and uses ACPI immediatly. (The new install
is on G:\, the old on C:\ ) "Great", I thought, "now I can risk a
forced repair-install on the other partition", and hit restart.

Well, guess what happens now.

I select the old install in Windows Boot Manager and this pops up:
Windows could not be started.
The following file is either missing or damaged:
<%systemRoot%>\system32\hal.dll

The Installer actually modified files on a partition other then his
install partition!
WHAT THE HELL? How can this happen?!

It modified at least the boot.ini, and probably other files on C:\

I even tried to downgrade the new install to MPS, didn't change the
situation with the old install, but I now have MPS-Uniprocessor-PC
TWICE in the device manager! (Again, how can this happen?!)

I'd really appreciate any ideas on how to get the old install running
again.

Regards,
Martin

 

[mx.2000]

Well, turns out the entry in boot.ini (automatically generated by the
Windows installer) for the old install simply pointed to the wrong
partition.

It was probably too hard for the Windows team to actually print out to
the screen that there is no OS to boot on the partition. Thanks for
this immensely helpful error message, suckers. *grrh*