From Hard Drive to Hard Drive

[Thorax_the_Impaler]

Hello everyone. And thanks for any answers in advance.

I'll try to keep this short. Basically I have two HDD's, each a different size. One is an older 80GB, and the other is a bigger and newer 250GB. Each of them contains an installation of MS Windows XP Professional. It has come to my attention that I would like to install a Linux-Windows XP dual boot on the computer I generally use, but 80GB isn't a very big drive, much less to split between two operating systems. I would essentially like to swap the Windows XP partitions across the drives. Normally I would just reinstall everything, but I cannot activate my Windows XP installations anymore thanks to Microsoft deciding I have "maxed out" my activations (Thank you, Mr. Gates); and I can't just swap the hardware because one of the machines is so different than the other in terms of hardware, the farthest I get is a bluescreen when trying to boot into the OS. So I basically need to move the Windows XP installation of the 250GB HDD to the 80GB HDD, and vice versa. Can anyone recommend a good way of going about this?

 

[carnageX]

You can still activate XP... You just have to call it in instead of activating over the internet.

You enter in an install ID code, it verifies it and either lets it go or you have to answer a few questions (is this being installed on a single system, blah blah.. just have to say yes to it), and then it has you enter a code in and you're activated. Takes 10-15 minutes.

I've only had to talk to a MS rep once when I was reinstalling XP for a customer and that's because it was pirated so it couldn't activate.

As for switching the HDD"s over... you can do this in a roundabout way. After swapping the HDD's to different machines, you need to run a repair install of XP. It does not wipe your data, but it just reinstalls the core XP files.
http://michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

If you still don't want to go either of those routes and still would rather image over... I would recommend Clonezilla and GParted. Use GParted to resize the larger partitioned XP so it could fit on the smaller HDD. Take images of the HDD's one at a time, save them onto an external HDD, wipe the HDD's, and then apply the images to the drives.

 

[Thorax_the_Impaler]

Thank you very much! I doubted I'd get any help on this. If I can activate XP over the phone, I'll just reinstall everything since the other method seems to involve a lot of hardware switching on my part. However, I would like to use Clonezilla to make backups of the images just in case. Thanks again.

 

[carnageX]

It'll attempt to activate over the internet and most likely fail, and then you will be given the option to activate over the phone.