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Migrating an old hard drive with an XP install to a new box

M

MrBond

Diamond Member
I ordered the components for a new rig from Newegg last night and hope to have them on Friday. It will be a complete build, but I'd like to take my SATA HDD from my old PC and use it as the main drive in the new PC. I'll be upgrading from a Pentium 4 (Intel 865PE chipset) to a C2D setup (Intel P35 chipset).

It's been a long time since I built a PC, but I seem to remember not being able to just swap the drive over without reinstalling XP. I've slipstreamed my XP disk with SP2, but I've got all the other updates on this system already and I'm not sure XP will allow me to reinstall over top my existing install with the XP/SP2 disk.

Is there anything I can do to make this as painless as possible? My drive is partitioned and C: is Windows only, but I'd rather not format C: since I've got a bunch of software that'd need reinstalled.
 
In just about every case, a new build requires a new clean install. XP will not run on a different mobo with a different chipset. It will give you a BSOD.

 
Originally posted by: corkyg
In just about every case, a new build requires a new clean install. XP will not run on a different mobo with a different chipset. It will give you a BSOD.
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OK, what can I do to ease the transition then? I remember it being a bit of a hassle last time I did this.
 
Yeah - it can be a hassle. But - you should be climbing the learning curve so that it is less of a hassle on subesequent runs.

There is migration software available to assist in such cases if "Q" is not around or handy.

Migrate
 
Originally posted by: MrBond
I ordered the components for a new rig from Newegg last night and hope to have them on Friday. It will be a complete build, but I'd like to take my SATA HDD from my old PC and use it as the main drive in the new PC. I'll be upgrading from a Pentium 4 (Intel 865PE chipset) to a C2D setup (Intel P35 chipset).

It's been a long time since I built a PC, but I seem to remember not being able to just swap the drive over without reinstalling XP. I've slipstreamed my XP disk with SP2, but I've got all the other updates on this system already and I'm not sure XP will allow me to reinstall over top my existing install with the XP/SP2 disk.

Is there anything I can do to make this as painless as possible? My drive is partitioned and C: is Windows only, but I'd rather not format C: since I've got a bunch of software that'd need reinstalled.
Click to expand...

There are two reasons Windows won't boot when changing motherboards:
1. Different HAL on the new MB
2. Incompatible boot controller on the new MB

HALs are typically the same these days, so that shouldn't be an issue if youre old machine is recent (and it looks like it is), so you need to worry about the disk controller.

The new machine should use the Intel Matrix controller, so I suggest trying the following:

First, ghost the drive first, prior to making any changes, and keep a copy handy!

Next, install the IASTOR driver from Intel onto the machine (while in the 865 MB), and put it into the P35 MB and see if it boots; it should

Then it's just a question of adding the right INFs and drivers so all your hardware is supported, and removing any old EXEs (the drivers themselves will be PnPd and won't run if not required, but you can uninstall them anyway if they have an uninstall program).

 
I was following right along 'till this;
Then it's just a question of adding the right INFs and drivers so all your hardware is supported, and removing any old EXEs (the drivers themselves will be PnPd and won't run if not required, but you can uninstall them anyway if they have an uninstall program).
Click to expand...


I hate it when some of you guys don't speak Engrish. 🙂
 
What luck, perfect question. 🙂 I was about to ask the same question as Mr Bond, almost identical circumstances (new build, wanted to use Win XP from old HDD without having to do a full software reinstall.....).

That leaves me thinking I should just bite the bullet and get Vista Home Premium, which I was planning to do in the near future anyway, and that way only have to do one painful install now (rather than one now and another later on). Just need to do a software compatibility check to see what does and does not work on Vista.....

Hate reinstalling the $%&# OS...... :|
 
Best thing to do is to clone the drive or backup the drive first just in case. Then you can do whatever you want... If anything screw up during the upgrade process, you can go back. Just remember to remove the old drivers first before you do the upgrade....
 
Thanks for the help guys. Here's how it all went down:

I assembled the new PC Friday evening. Got it starting up and booting to the "disk boot failure" stage (since I hadn't installed any new drives yet.)

I took my old system and hung a new 250gb SATA drive outside of it, then proceeded to copy the contents of two IDE drives it would be replacing onto it. Finally I used TrueImage to image my C: partition and copied it to the new 250GB SATA drive. I then pulled both SATA drives out of my old system and secured them in the new case.

It booted right into XP just fine. I was using a USB mouse, so it was a little difficult until the USB drivers got working. Once I got the mouse working, I went ahead and installed the Gigabyte drivers from the CD and a couple reboots later, everything works great. I fired up the HL2: Lost Coast demo and did something north of 130FPS, so it's certainly faster than my old build. The old rig wouldn't even run Lost Coast, so I'm doing pretty well already.

The only thing that's not working right is MBM5 is reporting a CPU temperature of -70C - which I'm sure can't be right.
 
what's "Q"?

I recently migrated a 200gb hd from an hp computer to a fresh build (mobo died for a friend but I had some spare parts lying around...). She had XP MCE on the hd, so I figured "what the heck". I had to take the activation code off the old pc but got MS to certify the new copy. This was especially nice since we could not find the XP disk that came with the computer. It runs perfectly.
 
Originally posted by: bryanW1995
what's "Q"?

I recently migrated a 200gb hd from an hp computer to a fresh build (mobo died for a friend but I had some spare parts lying around...). She had XP MCE on the hd, so I figured "what the heck". I had to take the activation code off the old pc but got MS to certify the new copy. This was especially nice since we could not find the XP disk that came with the computer. It runs perfectly.
Click to expand...
Who's "Q" is more correct. It's a play on my username - in the Bond films, Q was the quartermaster who gave Bond all his gadgets.
 
I thought Q was from Startrek TNG , but I wasn't paying attention to your user name.

That makes 2 good answers for Q helping move a windows install.


Jim
 
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