Upgrade hard drive with an already-installed OEM XP?

[CV73]

I asked for help with my first build in these forums a couple of years ago, which was invaluable and greatly appreciated. I learned a lot and felt an incredible sense of pride in plugging everything together and having it fire up without a hitch. And not to sound too cheesy, but I couldn't have done it without you.

[Insert sappy emoticon, if one exists]

But now I have a question. I've been unhurriedly upgrading the system I built way back when, little bits and pieces at a time. But my most recent purchase was large, and amounts to almost an entirely new system: MSI K9A2 Platinum, 2GB XMS2 and a 9600 Phenom. Everything went together flawlessly, its performance blows me away, and again, I lurked in this forum for help along the way. In about a month or two, I'd next like to move onto a hotter video card and larger, faster HDD.

I have an OEM of XP Home installed on my current drive, so could I simply transfer the contents of my drive, including the OS, onto a new HDD? I'm assuming doing so would be wildly problematic technically, in any case. I mean, I've got a pretty good handle on the more mechanical-type aspect of PC building, like plugging this thing into that thing and understanding which things will or will not work with others... but I'm still quite clueless about the down-and-dirtiest technological inner workings of drivers and bandwidths and whatnots

But to me, legally speaking, I bought the OEM license. So copying aside, could I at least somehow UN-install the OEM copy on the current drive and install it on the new one? Logically, that's kind of a gray area, where it wouldn't be a case of transferring the license to anyone else or installing it onto another PC; I would only be upgrading my own machine to a larger, faster drive and then wiping the old drive to use for backup storage.

I'll buy another copy if I have to, but I was just wondering.

[Vaillant]

the simplest solution for a HDD move is to use a 3rd party software like norton ghost or acronis true image.

These software allow you to copy a partition in its entirety, and is widely used to transplant windows installations as you need to do here.

Good Luck, Joe.

[glc]

After cloning the hard drive, you will probably have to do a repair reinstall of XP.

[CV73]

I purchased a 750GB drive and Acronis, and everything went smoothly. I did have to do an XP repair, but the entire process was no sweat at all. Thank you for the help.