xp oem

[fchavis]

ok this should a pretty simple thing, sorry if it is all over the archives, i didnt know what to search for.

friend of mine just got got a bunch of new parts for a computer. i put the thing together, so far so good. i told him earlier that he could just use his old hard drive (out of a dell) as the master to avoid having to go through the whole microsoft update ordeal. so i hooked up the old hard drive and booted up the system and it got about halfway through the boot process and then restarted. i was racking my brain for 3 hours trying everything i could think of, i booted just fine in safe made and installed all the new hardware and drivers, but still no joy on the normal boot. i installed windows on the new hard drive and it all worked great. i thought maybe it was a ati/nvidia thing, but i deleated all the old drivers and ran on default vga before installing the new ones, but that didnt help either.

so the only conclusion i can come up with is that the drive wont boot because the oem version of xp recognizes that it is in a new computer and wont boot for licensing reasons. is that the case? is an oem license only good for the one computer? i suppose that is the point and why it is so much cheaper. if you guys could clear that up for me, i'd appreciate it.

thanks,
-Jon

 

[Win2kpatcher]

Hi! You said you reinstalled Windows onto the hard drive that was moved over into the new machine? Like a clean install? Or this a new seperate hard drive?

The reason is because you cant simply move one hard drive that boots fine in one machine to another and expect it to boot about 90% of the time. You can easily fix this by running a repair on the OS on the hard drive that is having problems booting. Are you familiar with the repair proccess for XP?

 

[fchavis]

you mean from the repair console? booting off of the xp disc? do i just run scan disc?

 

[Win2kpatcher]

No its diff from the repair console. Boot from the XP CD then at that first screen push "ENTER" to proceed with new install..I forget the exact order of the next screens, but one is the EULA accept it with F8. Basically proceed like you were going to perform a new install and at one point it will scan your computer and detect the old OS and ask you if you would want to repair and to push "R" to run the repair. Be sure you dont push "R" at the very first screen you see though because you will as mentioned get the repair console which we dont need here.

 

[fchavis]

thanks, i'll give it a try. i cant believe i didnt try that earlier