Win XP fresh install on a secondary drive?

Hello

I have a 2.5" IDE drive and I need to place a fresh XP install on it. I am hoping it might be possible to connect the drive to an existing desktop PC and to perform the install that way?

So my question is: Would it be possible to perform a basic Windows XP installation on a second hard drive, using a computer which is already running XP on its primary hard drive?

Thanks for your help.

Pipps

 

Yes it certainly is. But there are difficulties.

You can obtain cheap adapters to connect the laptop drive to the desktop. Laptops drives have different physical connections.

When you run windows setup from the Windows CD you are given the opportunity as to where and on which drive you install.

However

During the installation Windows setup gathers information about the computer it is running on and set up Windows XP accordingly. In this case that would be the desktop. Obviously all wrong for your laptop.

Worse the process generates a "hash" from manufacturers codes for all the hardware (drives, motherboard etc etc) that is found and uses this for the activation.

So it is impractical to use the new XP setup to run the laptop, it will only work on the desktop it was installed in.

 

Thank you for your help.

 

You could buy an external 2.5" drive enclosure, put the new drive in there and install XP from your laptop. That would allow you to avoid most of the inconsistencies. That is as long as your laptop can see the drive at bootup.