Re-installing WinXP; OEM license

graemenz

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Jul 19, 2005
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I have an 80GB hard drive with several 8GB partitions and also dual booting Mandrake Linux with Win XP and an OEM Windows license. My C drive is nearly full and my PC also sometimes experiences "crashes" to do with svchost. These crashes are possibly gone now (maybe due to a MS hotfix), however I would like to have a larger C drive. From looking at partition magic and acronis etc and seeing that people often have problems using them for this kind of thing, I feel inclined to reinstall XP from scratch on a second hard drive and do it gradually as I've got time.

So my idea is that I'll install a second 160GB hard drive Samsung SP1614N and use the boot facilities provided by the Mandrake boot manager to choose whether to boot into the OS on the second hard drive or on the first.

Any ideas if it's legal for me to maintain the two WinXP OS's while I establish the new one - could take me several weeks ... Will the Microsoft activation thing prevent me doing this? If I clone/expand C drive onto the second hard drive instead of reinstalling, will I have the same problem?

Any other ideas?
TIA

Graeme
 

FlyingPenguin

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Nov 1, 2000
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In the real world, Microsoft actually allows 3 or 4 activations on different hardware before requiring you to talk to a real person and plead your case (and even then it's no big deal - you tell them you're a power user and change your hardware every 6 months, no big deal, just never say anything that will violate the EULA like admitting it's installed on more than one computer).

Since the only thing that's going to change on your system is the drive that the XP partition will be stored on, and that's not enough of a change to qualify as different hardware. You could probably copy the activation file from the original install and import it into the new install and it would probably work without requiring activation. There is nothing illegal about this.

Instructions here: http://netsecurity.about.com/od/windowsxp/qt/aaqtwinxp0829.htm

HOWEVER, I think you're putting yourself through a whole lot of needless grief. The smarter thing to do would be to clone the existing 80Gb drive to the new 160Gb drive using Norton Ghost or some other disk cloning software. I'm personally familiar with Ghost, and ghost will allow you to individually set the size of all the partitions on the cloned drive (so yes, in the process of cloning the drive you can make the XP partition larger).

This would be FAR simpler. All your existing installed OSes should work fine and even if something goes wrong, you still have the original 80Gb drive as a backup.

Hope this helps...
 

graemenz

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Jul 19, 2005
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I guess I could give Norton ghost a try. Symantec website lists resizing partitions as a partition magic feature but not a Norton ghost feature - but obviously you're familiar with Norton ghost so I'll take your word for it, though I'm wondering if I might find partition magic useful. I've heard some people have problems doing this kind of thing so I'm a little nervous about it.

Thanks.
Graeme
 

FlyingPenguin

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Nov 1, 2000
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Norton Ghost doesn't resize an existing partition - you need partition magic for that. Ghost does, however, change the size of a partition on the destination when cloning a drive.

Using Norton to clone the 80Gb to 160Gb is by far the safest method. You're in no way altering the original 80Gb drive. You're just copying the partitions to a new drive and resizing them in the process. Anything goes wrong you still have the 80Gb drive as a backup you can go back to.

It would be far riskier using partition magic on the 80Gb drive. Partition Magic is a fine app - I use it all the time, but there is some risk. You should always backup your data before using it. I've seen plenty of drives corrupted by a failed partition magic attempt.

 

graemenz

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Jul 19, 2005
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Thanks. I feel a lot happier about it now.

Any idea if the cloned drive will replicate the boot information i.e. when I set the new drive as the one to boot from will I get the Mandrake boot screen that I get with my existing drive and will it use the Mandrake OS on the cloned drive rather than the original drive if I choose to boot into Linux - I have XP as the default OS to boot into.

Also, I have partitions C to L on my existing drive - will they still be called C to L on the new drive ?? - and will I be able to access the 80GB drive after I boot into the new drive? I have an external 160GB USB hard drive I backup to, but I'll probably want to use the 80GB for backup as well, if I can do it.

Thanks for your help.

Graeme
 

FlyingPenguin

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Nov 1, 2000
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I'm no expert on Linux but since the clone will be an exact duplicate of the original drive (expect for the re-sized partitions) it should work just the way it does now. The boot sectors will be the same. Only concievable problem would be if your OS doesn't support that large a drive (pre-SP1 WinXP for instance doesn't support drives over 137Gb).

If all you had were Windows OSes on the drive I'd guarantee you you'd have no problems. I don't know enough about Linux though to tell you how you'll make out. Maybe someone else who's a Linux expert can chime in.

Partition lettering should remain the same after a clone.

You can still plug in the 80Gb drive as a spare and use it for backups, sure.

 

superfly27

Senior member
Jun 25, 2005
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I'd like to know more about that activation file. If I installed WinXP and never registered or whatever, what am I missing? Is my OS emasculated in any way? Will my computer suddenly stop working?
 

FlyingPenguin

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Nov 1, 2000
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Registering and Activating are two different things (although we all usually mix up the two terms all the time).

You don't need to register (why put yourself on a mailing list?). You have no choice about activation. 15 - 30 days (depending on whether it's the home or pro version of XP) after you install it, it will stop booting to the desktop unless you activate it (you can activate it anytime, even after the time limit).

For most OEM systems (Dell for certain) you don't need to do an activation - the OEM vendor has a special OEM license that doesn't require activation. It's essentially already "pre-activated" when you buy it. If, however, you have to re-install Windows later (because your drive gets trashed for instance) then you'll need to activate it and it'll nag you to do that every time you boot it and tell you how many days are left in the activation period before it stops working.