Moving Windows XP to different drive.

Hey guys,

Has anyone moved Windows XP from one drive on the same computer to another (no I don't count moving it from the D drive to the HD, smarty ).

If so, is it as hard and slow as a total reinstall or is there an easier way? I may want to move my OS to a smaller HD and use the bigger one as a dedicated streaming drive, but I would rather not go through a lot of suffering and have to travel to the dreaded land of reactivation if possible (especially since I just reinstalled and reactivated this weekend because of some corrupted system files).

Any advice is appreciated!

Thanks,
Dave

 

You can move it by using a tool like ghost. Use that to make an iamge and then use the image to put it on the other HD. Don't try to just copy all the files from one to the other, as that wouldn't work too well(if at all).

 

Please note that a change in hardware will require you to re-activate your copy of Windows XP.

 

Yea, I figured there are so many registry issues and maybe other hidden files, etc., that I couldn't copy it, plus we all know how MS feels about copying anything. I'm wary of trying to reactivate because, as I said, I just reactivated because of a corruption issue. Maybe I'll just wait a while and do it. Very frustrating when you can't just do basic things like this with the software that is legitimately yours.

Thanks for the advice about Ghost. I'll look into that.

Dave

 

Actually if you do it correctly you shouldn't have to activate. Activation only has to be done if there is 10 or more HW changes. In your case you're keeping everything the same besides the HD. So that's only 1 change out of 10. Which to be quite honest might not even count since it's an HD, and people add those all the time.

So really the switch over should work just fine, so long as you don't change other parts of the computer.