replacing system drive...

[Ness]

I've got a 40GB WD Drive that's a total screamer... I want to get rid of it.

I've got Windows XP Installed on it and it's my F: Drive.. how and why it got labelled as my F drive during formatting and partitioning... I don't know.

What I want to do is transfer the install of XP onto one of my new 80GB drives, and in the process switch the system drive to C:, as some programs have hard-coded themselves to install to C:, and having F as a system drive letter has avoided a few virii, but generally been a pain in the ass...

Is there any program that will flawlessly (or near flawlessly) recreate my system drive with all the programs and whatnot and go through and change all the paths to reflect the change in drive letters?

 

[Cheetah8799]

Norton/Symantec Ghost. There is a DOS version that you can run from a bootable floppy to "ghost" one drive onto another. That's how I do it.

 

[Ness]

hey Cheetah, thanks for the link you PMed me.

It got the drive to copy over and it starts to boot, but I get an error saying that XP can't find the activation file... any idea as to a fix for this? Is there a way to un-activate XP then re-activate it?

Also, the XP user manual is very stupid on booting into safe mode. It says to hold F8 while the list of operating systems appear... but on a normal, non-multi boot machine there is no list. I've tried holding it after the POST until windows loads, I've tried pressing it once when windows is loading, I've tried pressing it a bunch of times shortly before and during windows loading...

For the first time ever I'd like to say that XP can suck it. Stupid activation.

 

[thraxes]

There is always the possibilty to visit a "shady" site which has activation cracks. They sometimes are quite handy for legal users aswell.

 

[Ness]

No, I can't successfully boot to the hard drive that I'm changing to, therefore activation cracks do no good as none that I've seen are bootable floppy ones.

Windows does not get to the point where I can do anything. I can hook up the new HD as a slave (obviously no problem there) and edit files, but I wouldn't have the foggiest idea how to get to the registry on a slave drive and edit it to edit out the activation...

And I'd rather not take the risk of them jacking my activation code or any sort of crap like that.

 

[Ness]

after about 3 different messes, I realized I had been trying to make this happen for 16 hours. So I just said screw it and reinstalled windows from scratch.

Thanks for your help anyway, guys, especially cheetah.