Moving an XP hard drive

[Panama Red]

I just did this and I was amazed (again) at how great XP handles changes. I changed motherboards, including manufacturer, cpu and power supply in a fully operational system. Before I shut down the system for the last time I went into Device Manager and Removed the onboard sound, the onboard LAN and nothing else. I used the same ATI 9600XT again. I did not remove the USB or IDE controllers prior to shut down. I left all programs intact except for Asus Updater and Asus Probe. Those two were removed. I then shut down the old system for the last time.

Installed the new hardware, booted to bios, set CD rom as first boot device in case I would need to boot to my XP CD, made other bios changes I desired, crossed my fingers and exited bios saving changes. XP came up without a problem and promply identified all the new hardware. The 'new hardware wizard' popped up and I placed the new mobo cd in the drive. The wizard found each driver one at a time including my existing Omega drivers for the graphics card. Once the LAN drivers were installed a new hardware balloon appeared in the task bar asking to configure my network. I ignored it and finished the installation of all other hardware drivers. When the wizards were finished, I reset my screen resolution and refresh rate. That was it. Device manager shows everything working fine. No need to reset the network either. It's already there and working. My AVG and PopUp stopper started as before and all programs seem to work fine. XP is just plain awesome!

So, if you are wondering about moving a hard drive from one system to another or changing motherboards and cpu's on a system, it can be done easily and with confidence.

[trulad]

You are correct as usual. I recently changed out a motherboard and cpu with the same results. It was the most painless process yet.
trulad

[bigandy]

Thanks for this PR. This seems to be an increasingly popular topic around here .

[ajmatson]

Since I am a newbie to upgrading my system I am kinda cinfused. I am running XP Home and I changed the Mobo, cpu, memory, and video card. The prior board had built in video. What would I need to shut down in the device manager to make this work. Thanks alot for all the help you guys give PCMECH rocks.

[Panama Red]

It's not 'shut down', it's Remove in Device Manager. Remove the sound, the video, and any lan drivers native to the old card. If your modem is the same you should be ok with that. Do this just before you plan to dissassemble the machine. Do not restart after any item is removed. Just Remove them all and shut down the computer. Change your hardware and XP should do it's thing. Make sure XP is fully updated before you attempt this.

[OMG!]

I have to say this is quite odd, but when I moved mine, they told me I cheated the system basically and said I'd have to reregister Windows XP with micosoft. I called them up and said if I wanted to keep it on that computer I had to pay another $84. I said but my old computer parts died and I needed to replace them. The girl had mercy on me an gave me a new key.

[speeddude2000]

yes that happened with me too! but all i did was just install a mouse :/

[Rapier]

Please delete

I put this here by mistake

[Encabis]

You have to be careful when dealing with legal Windows XP OS's. They work on a 10 point finger print (IE CPU size and serial, RAM size, AGP size type, MoBo type, etc, etc) The trick to avoid the loop is to change one thing at a time and allow a day or so to pass before changing another component. If and when you have to deal with the Microsoft call centers it is important to know your rights and software agreements. You are allowed so many hardware updates per time frame.

You are asking for big potential problems swapping HDD's between two XP running machines. Sometimes you may get lucky sometimes you wont...