Swapping a HHD from one laptop to another problem

[teemro]

Hi

I have two laptops, one is a Dell and one is a HP Pavillion thing. Both have XP on.

For the second time, the mobo on the HP is playing up (I get one long beep and two short) and a blank screen. When this happened a year ago I got the mobo swapped out and it's been fine since then (until now).

So what I have done is take the HDD out of the HP and into this Dell (inferior memory etc.) so that I can retrieve important work data and buy some time to get the HP looked at.

However, when I started the Dell up with the HDD from the HP in it, I got the message that I had three days to 'validate' this copy of XP! Arghhhhh!

Is this machine going to stop working because of this?
Can I put this HDD back into the HP, and the original HDD back into the Dell and then use the Dell, or will that also want to be 'validated'?

What a pest!

Any thoughts on action I can take to prevent this happening?

Many thanks

[teemro]

Can I just add that I seem to have collected about four or five HDDs from various laptops and desktops pcs that I would like to access at some point - is is possible to interface with any of these drives given their varying types? (laptop, desktop), on one desktop perhaps?

Like having about six drive bays to accomodate them? Each has an OS on them.

[EzyStvy]

It is not legal to transfer an OEM operating system from one pc to another...

You're lucky it booted up at all since the drivers are all different.
Putting the Dell drive back into the Dell shouldn't be a problem.
Putting the HP drive back will be an issue since you probably can't activate it due to the illegal swap.....You should have stuck the drive in an external enclosure.

[teemro]

This 'external enclosure' - is it something that should be available widely? Would it enable me to read the contents of the HDD?

[teemro]

I just did a search and found these enclosures so I'll look into them.

[shadowpr]

Might want to invest into something like this: http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=2020&cpc=SCH

I've used it to access data off of hard drives before and it works well for that purpose.

[teemro]

Thanks for that, that looks handy.

[teemro]

Originally Posted by shadowpr Might want to invest into something like this: http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=2020&cpc=SCH I've used it to access data off of hard drives before and it works well for that purpose.

Hey pal, that's fantastic - worked for me first time. I've also access a couple of HDDs thanks to this utility.

Many thanks, prolem mostly solved!

Just got to sort that mobo.

Thanks Shadow.

[shadowpr]

Wish I could accept that credit, but I actually found it from some people here.

It does come in handy though.

Glad it worked out for you.