XP is touchy about exactly what sort of IDE cable you are using. If the new
disk is rated as ATA/100 ot ATA/133 you must use an 80-pin cable, which
usually comes with the disk. If you use a 40-pin cable, XP will refuse to
run. If you have a 40pin cable and attemptede to install XP from scratch,
the XP installer would refuse to proceed.
The other possibility is the HAL, the hardware abstraction layer. Unlike
98, XP installs special drivers for each piece of hardware, including IDE
disks. If you swap a disk, there is a good chance that these are wrong.
Thus, you need to perfomr a "repair" installation of XP. This is like a
full installation, but it does NOT format the hard drive, and thus leaves
your personal files and most settings. However, it does erase all XP
updates and service packs, so you will need to use XP update to re-download
and re-install them.
As for activation, changing only the hard drive, in a 3-month period, should
not invalidate the activation. And, if it did, you should get a clear
message to re-activate and button to press to do it via the internet.
XP is touchy about exactly what sort of IDE cable you are using. If the new
disk is rated as ATA/100 ot ATA/133 you must use an 80-pin cable, which
usually comes with the disk. If you use a 40-pin cable, XP will refuse to
run.
Stephen Westrip said:
I am running Windows XP Professional and have installed a new HDD drive as
the master drive. I did this by creating an image from my original HDD and
then copied it across to the new HDD. The reason for doing this is that the
new disk has a larger capacity. What happens now is that when I boot the
machine it goes as far as the screen where you would expect to see the user
names which you click on to log in. Now all I get is the XP logo. I suspect
I have fallen foul of the activation policy, in particular the hardware part
of it. What I need to know is how to get over this problem. I do not want to
keep my original disk in this PC. All I want is my new HDD. What do I have
to do?
