tireman said:
I have OEM WIn-XP on an older machine. I want to move all my programs to a
completely new PC.
I know MS won't let me use my OEM license on the new machine. No problem it
will go with the old PC when I sell it.
I purchased a new retail Win-XP (upgrade package)
What is procedure to move everything from old PC to the new one and apply
the new license to the new instalation?
There are quite a few articles in the MS KnowledgeBase that speak
about that. Look for the words "Inplace upgrade" or "sysprep".
Basically, you install your old drive into the new PC, with windows
installed on it and all your apps. Then you do one of 2 things:
Either you reinstall from the winxp cd into the same windows folder
(this won't break your applications, but you'll have to re-apply all
windows patches and critical updates), or you use sysprep (more on
that later).
If you want, you can also migrate your windows to a new drive while
still on the old PC, if possible (if the new drive's interface is
compatible with your new system), have it work properly there on the
new drive, before moving the new drive to the new PC.
To migrate your windows + apps to a new drive, you need to put them in
a partition such that the drive letter won't change for windows. This
can be tricky (but not impossible) if you've installed windows on a
partition other than c:
Once the drive letter problem is solved, you have to think about all
the hardware suddenly changing for windows. This is why you need to
do a "repair" setup, and reinstall windows into the same folder as
before. This will cause windows to forget about all the hardware and
discover it again, loading the proper drivers. If you have a SCSI or
RAID controller on your machine, you should press F6 very early in the
setup (keep your eyes at the bottom of the screen and look for the F6
prompt) and give setup a diskette or CD with the proper driver for
your controller.
Also very important, setup will look for current windows
installations, discover your old one and propose to do an in-place
upgrade... LOOK AT THE DRIVE LETTER IT SHOWS FOR YOUR WINDOWS ! If
the drive letter is wrong, DO NOT INSTALL! First make sure the drive
letter is right. (If the letter is too small, you need to create some
new partitions to shift your drive letter up, if too big, you need to
hide or delete some partitions to get the letter right. Use Partition
Magic, or Drive Image on DOS diskette to play around with partitions
before you get windows up and running.)
Be aware that winxp/2k gives priority to removable drives when
assigning drive letters, and it considers a card reader, USB flash,
etc as a removable drive. You can use those to your advantage when
trying to shift drive letters around before installing.
After you have installed windows, you can recreate the partitions or
delete them again; windows will always keep its original drive letter
which it used during install.
During the install, make sure you ARE NOT CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET,
because you'll catch 100 viruses. Connect to the internet only after
windows is running, and you've installed a good firewall (other than
the lousy one that comes with windows) and a good AntiVirus.
After you install go pay a visit to
http://update.microsoft.com with
Internet Explorer and hit the "CUSTOM" button to get all the critical
updates.
Good luck. I predict at least 5 hours of work.
Habib
PS:
About sysprep. I've never tried it, but the theory is that if you run
it on a working windows installation, it will cause windows to
rediscover all the hardware the next time it boots (plus it will
de-activate your winxp activation by assigning a new unique number to
your PC). So you run it, then move the hard disk to the new pc.
However, the same rule about drive letter not changing applies. So you
should test first. So you should probably make a copy/backup of your
working windows partition in case anything goes wrong.
