Moving HD with Win XP to a new PC ?
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Thread: Moving HD with Win XP to a new PC ?

  1. #1
    Join Date
    May 2005
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    2

    Moving HD with Win XP to a new PC ?

    we have 3 PC's in the family all running official win XP's , last week we decided to go out & buy 3 new pc's ( faster better spec etc .. ), all identical spec new pc's , we take out the HD's with win xp out of every old pc & plug them into the new pc's , we boot up one of the pc's straight away & comes up with a screen saying "the hardware has changed, please click here to re-activate" & we end up having to call microsoft to get a new activation key , after we put in the new key the pc start starts up & is working all fine & lovely.

    now .....

    we try booting up the other 2 pc's after seeing how easy the first one was & all we are getting is a screen that says "windows didn't shut down properly last time" , you know the screen that gives you the choice of safe mode , last good config or start windows normally but whenever you select one of these options it just resets the machine.

    any idea why this is happening ?

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Nov 2003
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    45 Degrees North - 10 Degrees East
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    First guess is the hardware is so radically different the drive is lookling for drivers it doesn't have and needs and there could be some sort of defense mechnaism built in to defeat exactly what you are doing, otherwise people would be selling .iso images for installs.
    Is it too hard to just do a clean install?
    MCSE 2003, Network+, Security+
    Microsoft MVP Windows Server - Networking

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Oct 2002
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    Cheshire UK
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    You could try a repair install provided you have the full version windows CD [
    http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/moving_xp.html ] or if the new systems already have XP installed you could use the files and settings transfer wizard built into windows.

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Feb 2001
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    Adelaide, South Australia
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    Those other two machines are actually bluescreening with an INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE error. In a nutshell, the hard drive controller is different on the new PC and so Windows doesn't have the driver installed. An over-the-top repair install is pretty much your only way past it at this point.
    Safe computing is a habit, not a toolkit.

  5. #5
    Join Date
    May 2005
    Posts
    2
    thanks for all your help.

    gonna be giving it a go later on this afternoon & will report back the results , I did have a few people say to try the repair funtion with a win xp cd so sounds like the likely solution.

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