Swopping Hard Drives to a different PC

J

jesperaudi

New Member
A friend asked me to rescue photos etc from a very old Dell computer, running winxp, and it has a Seagate Barracuda ATA iv 80gb drive. Everything would load on this pc but it was incredibly slow, probably low ram.

I managed to put this in as a slave drive on one of my old Mesh computers (1gbRAM, WinXP iii, has a Maxtor ATA 120gb 3.5 series) so I know I can transfer all the info but I came up with the idea of putting the Barracuda into the Mesh as a single drive and just giving her a new (but oldish pc) and she could carry one with all the accounts set up.

Unfortunately, when putting the Barracuda into my Mesh as a Single Drive, Windows XP doesn't load. Is this because it is a Mesh and the original was a Dell? I don't know what I am talking about but is it a bios issue?

Any ideas anyone. I am pretending to know something about about computers but I have already invested many hours in this issue.

Thanks Jesper
 
It's not a BIOS issue. It's the fact that that load of Windows was installed on different hardware from the Mesh. So therefore you would need to wipe and reinstall Windows.
 
Heh, thanks for posting Voyagerfan

Any ideas how I would re-install WindowsXP, I do have original License no that is on the old box, but as I say that is for a Dell and I want to use the disk in a Mesh.

Would it work if I deleted the whole Windows directory on the the Barracuda hardrive from the dell, then literally copied the Windows directory from my Mesh hard drive onto the dell barracuda drive, for use in my mesh pc??

I should add that I want to keep the data that is on the Barracuda drive, so I wouldn't want to wipe it entirely.


Thanks again, Jesper
 
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jesperaudi said:
Heh, thanks for posting Voyagerfan

Any ideas how I would re-install WindowsXP, I do have original License no that is on the old box, but as I say that is for a Dell and I want to use the disk in a Mesh.

Would it work if I deleted the whole Windows directory on the the Barracuda hardrive from the dell, then literally copied the Windows directory from my Mesh hard drive onto the dell barracuda drive, for use in my mesh pc??

I should add that I want to keep the data that is on the Barracuda drive, so I wouldn't want to wipe it entirely.


Thanks again, Jesper
Click to expand...

It will still cause issues as programs are different on each drives. You need to shrink the partition on the maxtor to the size of the seagate. then use a clone software do a partition clone. then do a windows repair to make it work.
Cheers
 
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Hi Paul,

Thanks for taking the time. I don't think I have space to clone a whole drive, essentially I just want to get the old drive to load.

I probably wouldn't be too worrried about programs as most of those could be re-loaded, in fact all I probably want are the Documents and Pics folders and the account settings.

Is there another way to load XP in any other way, say via a recovery disk and then subsequently update windows on the dell barracuda drive?

Only trouble is I only have a dell recovery disk service pack 2 and I want to put it onto a mesh. I don't seem to have a mesh recovery disk for the newer pc (well I have one but it says win xp home copyright 2001!!). If I was able to get the mesh to start with that, would I be able to go through updates to get the hard drive up-to-date, bearing in mind xp is 'no longer supported'?

Thanks, Jesper
 
jesperaudi said:
Hi Paul,

Thanks for taking the time. I don't think I have space to clone a whole drive, essentially I just want to get the old drive to load.

I probably wouldn't be too worrried about programs as most of those could be re-loaded, in fact all I probably want are the Documents and Pics folders and the account settings.

Is there another way to load XP in any other way, say via a recovery disk and then subsequently update windows on the dell barracuda drive?

Only trouble is I only have a dell recovery disk service pack 2 and I want to put it onto a mesh. I don't seem to have a mesh recovery disk for the newer pc (well I have one but it says win xp home copyright 2001!!). If I was able to get the mesh to start with that, would I be able to go through updates to get the hard drive up-to-date, bearing in mind xp is 'no longer supported'?

Thanks, Jesper
Click to expand...

First, you cannot use the Dell disk on the Mesh - the keys won't work with it. What you can do is copy the files off the Mesh CD and use a program called nLite to slipstream all three service packs onto the CD, then burn the updated content to a new CD.

And FYI - XP is supported until April 2014.

nLite

XP SP1

XP SP2

XP SP3
 
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Wow, that sounds good. Oh and I didn't know about the support so that is even better. Many thanks I will explore that.

Cheers Jesper
 
For the seagate to work in the Mesh computer, it has to be a clean windows install or a partition or disk clone.
cheers.
 
Thanks Paul,

Forgetting the partition or disk clone at the moment, how do I get a clean Windows install? And could you confirm with an install, presumably I would lose all my account settings anyway?

I'm thinking that I could change the setup to load from my cd drive and get the Mesh recovery disk to repair or replace my existing windows installation on the seagate. Do I need to, say delete windows before doing that. And will my data be protected?

Thanks Jesper
 
When you do clean installation or system recovery, it will destroy all your data in the same partition, no information left. that is why I said use partition clone. in that way you have all the information from the maxtor drive include windows activation and all the data.
Cheers.
 
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