Activation question when moving a hard drive with XP to new equipment

[Timothy A. Grove]

I have a client that has a hard drive that is going bad.
I am going to use Norton Ghost to clone it onto a bigger
drive, giving him more space. At the same time, his
machine is a P3 800, and he wants me to upgrade it to
something faster.

So, the matter I have is that I have a disk from one
computer that is going to be put into another, and the
old computer discarded. Will XP need to be activated
again, and if so, how?

 

[JeffO]

The limit for number of items you can change before being
forced to re-activate is, I think, six. More complex
items, like most motherboards, will count as more than six
items. Depending on how many items the computer has
already had replaced, like modems, etc. replacing the hard
drive probably won't cause re-activation.

When Ghosting XP, you should be more concerned with the
version of XP. Some versions won't Ghost, as was
intentionally programmed by MS. Some OEMs, like Dell, and
most volume license corporate, like Select, will Ghost
fine, if you have Ghost 6.05 or later. If you are dealing
with retail XP, you might get the image, but the image
doesn't Ghost to the new drive successfully.