Hokie_Fan said:
My hard drive is about to die - so I'm going to replace it.
When I reinstall windows XP Home edition on the new drive,
am I going to have problems with Microsoft when I try to
register the operating system again?
Why not just clone the old drive, that is copy all the
contents of the old drive onto the new drive and forget about
re-installation of all your software and re-activation? Most hard
drive manufacturers include a CD with their retail hard drives that
contain a cloning utility to do just that. There are even free utilities
that do the same thing that you can download, such as xxClone
(see
www.xxClone.com ) The usual way to do cloning (which
you can subsequently do to archive copies of the entire system
in one fell swoop) is to use a specialized cloning utility such as
Norton Ghost (which now incorporates PowerQuest's Drive Image)
to do the cloning. Tell the utility to put the contents of the old hard
drive into a "primary" partition on the new hard drive and to copy
the MBR (Master Boot Record) - both necessary for it to be bootable.
Once this is done, everything - the entire OS and your data - will be
on the new hard drive and you can reformat the old hard drive and
use it as a backup medium or for extra storage.
If you think you might want to use the old OS as a backup OS in the
event the new hard drive crashes, don't reformat the old hard drive.
Just prepare the new OS for booting by booting it for the 1st time in
isolation from the old OS. If the new OS sees the old OS during its
1st boot-up, the new OS will have some pointers set to point back to
the old OS and the new OS will thereafter depend on the continued
presence of the old OS. To prevent that, just disconnect the old hard
drive and put the new hard drive in its place when you boot the new one
for the 1st time. It really doesn't matter which hard drive is Master or
Slave, but it keeps you having to adjust the BIOS' boot sequence if you
jumper the new hard drive to be the same as the jumpering had been
for the old hard drive (presumably Master) and jumper the old hard drive
to be the opposite. Otherwise, if you use Cable Select mode, you can
bypass Master/Slave jumpering altogether and just use the position on
the IDE ribbon cable to determine Master and Slave. After the new hard
drive boots up for the 1st time, subsequent boots can have the new OS
see the old OS without a problem.
When the new hard drive boots up, the new OS will be on the "C:"
drive, and the old hard drive will just be given a name such as
"Local Disk (E
", and you can drag 'n drop files between the drives.
If you want to boot the old OS, just add an entry in the new OS's boot.ini
file (at C:\boot.ini) which points to it. Assuming the old OS is on the 1st
partition of the old drive, and the old drive is 2nd in the BIOS' boot
sequence, that is in relative position "1" to the start of the boot sequence
(all of which are probable), just use Notepad to add the line:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Old WinXP system" /fastdetect
as the last line to the existing boot.ini file which probably looks
something like this:
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="New WinXP system" /fastdetect
In the above file, the text between the quotes is purely arbitrary,
and you can set it to whatever you think makes sense to you. And
you can set the 'timeout=' value to whatever number of seconds
you want to have to make up your mind about which OS to boot.
Thereafter, when the new hard drive's boot manager activates at
boot time, it will list the two boot.ini file entries, and you can select
which OS boots up - the new WinXP or the old WinXP. *And* you
can still use the old hard drive to save files.
*TimDaniels*
