Tech Support > Computers & Technology > Hard drive swapping help
Hard drive swapping help
Posted by Rick on January 13th, 2004


I am looking to swap hard drives from one machine to another. The
hard drive is in a box with an intel 810 chipset and I want to put it in
my other machine which has a KT400 chipset.I am hoping to just swap the
drive into the other box and have it boot fine, but will it? The OS is
Win XP pro, I am prepared to re-activate windows but don't want to loose
data, will it crash or will I be OK?

Posted by °Mike° on January 14th, 2004


The chipset has nothing to do with whether a hard drive
will be seen, or not. It will boot fine, but you will most
likely have to reinstall Windows from scratch, as there
will be too many hardware changes, and Windows XP
will refuse to run. See:
http://aumha.org/win5/a/wpa.htm


On Tue, 13 Jan 2004 23:04:34 GMT, in
<6Q_Mb.62776$IF6.1420033@ursa-nb00s0.nbnet.nb.ca>
Rick scrawled:

--
Basic computer maintenance
http://uk.geocities.com/personel44/maintenance.html

Posted by Rick on January 14th, 2004


That's what I don't want to have to do, re installing windows will cause
me to loose all my data. Is there a way other then a complete backup
that I can save my data, somebody must have a trick? The hardware
changes will force me to call microsoft to reactive XP but that is not a
worry beacause it is a legitimate copy and I went through it before but
in the old P1 days I could swap hard drives all day, it would work, do I
have any chance of it working and not loosing my data?

°Mike° wrote:

Posted by °Mike° on January 14th, 2004


Adding a new hard drive to an existing XP system is not a
problem, but switching the XP hard drive to a new system
is. There is no way around it. Back up your data if you
want to switch.


On Wed, 14 Jan 2004 00:31:47 GMT, in
<T50Nb.62840$IF6.1422199@ursa-nb00s0.nbnet.nb.ca>
Rick scrawled:

--
Basic computer maintenance
http://uk.geocities.com/personel44/maintenance.html

Posted by Billh on January 14th, 2004


While I have not done this with XP let me tell you what I have done at work.

I work at a school and one way we have gotten computer over the years is
from donations. Wiped drive no software or drivers. I made a Generic build
of Windows 98 and 2000. Then I imaged them and shot that out to all the
others. With 98 I have had great success. It starts up detects and install
drivers for most everything except some video sound and nic. With 2000 I
have had good luck over all but have run in some computers that just will
not boot windows and needed to be installed from scratch. Oddly as I have
more then one of each model computer some worked some did not so I do not
know what causes the generic install not to work. BTW the donated computers
I tried the 2000 test on was 100 units. While I did not keep track of the
failures on the generic I do not think it was over 20 percent.

Will this work on XP I can not say it will work with out fail but I would
think you have a good shot at it working. At work I am working on lab
computers that I don't care about data loss but if I did I would find
another hard drive and ghost the first one to the second one and use the
second drive to try it and if it does not work you have lost nothing.


"Rick" <rickw1@ns.sympatico.ca> wrote in message
news:6Q_Mb.62776$IF6.1420033@ursa-nb00s0.nbnet.nb.ca...


Posted by Tergiversative on January 14th, 2004


I can't agree at all.

It will likely work fine, at the very least in Safe Mode with VGA, at
which point you can fix the various hardware differences by installing &
removing "devices" as needed.

WORST case, you should only have to run a "repair" re-install from the XP
CD, not have to re-install everything and certainly NOT lose all the data
or user profiles.

-- DE



ï¿½ï¿½ï¿½ï¿½ï¿½ï¿½ï¿½ï¿½ï¿½ï¿½ï¿½ï¿½ï¿½ï¿½ï¿½ï¿½ï¿ ½ï¿½ï¿½ï¿½ï¿½ï¿½ï¿½ï¿½ï¿½ï¿½ï¿½ï¿½ï¿½ï¿½ï¿½ï¿½ï¿½ï ¿½ï¿½ wrote:


Posted by B.Al.Zeebub on January 14th, 2004


On Wed, 14 Jan 2004 00:31:47 +0000, Rick pecked at a keyboard in panic:

Partition your hard drive: C = Windows XP; D = My Documents. Use Explorer
to _move_ My Documents over to the new partition. Windows installs to
Drive: C by default. But then, it's recommended to do a _backup_ before
you mess around with partitions.

http://directory.google.com/Top/Comp...ent/Partition/

You could also try an in place upgrade, http://tinyurl.com/2efva where you
re-install the OS into the same Windows folder, and it should leave
everything else alone. I've done it, but I made a _backup_ before I
attempted it, and you need to re-install all your old Service Packs,
product updates, programs etc. And it's not too painful if you have all
your important stuff saved in a regular, weekly scheduled, incremental
_backup_ on CD, CD-RW, USB pen drive or even a manky old Zip drive.
And here's a trick...
http://cs.bluffton.edu/~scoffman/trick.html
--
B.Al.Zeebub
Registered Linux User #339345
Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?-Groucho Marx


Posted by °Mike° on January 14th, 2004


If you don't agree, then try it.


On Wed, 14 Jan 2004 01:31:07 -0800, in
<40050C5B.6070601@somewhereorother.noinfo>
Tergiversative scrawled:

--
Basic computer maintenance
http://uk.geocities.com/personel44/maintenance.html


Similar Posts