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Windows XP.... question regarding hard drive transfers. This one could be a tough one.

C

Cybordolphin

Platinum Member
I have my family send me JUST their hard drives (rather than the whole computers) to save on shipping now. This way I can clean up their messes, get rid of trojans/viruses, and reformat etc..

BUT...... my system is made up of different components than theirs.

Herein lies the problem....

Even though we all use XP (corporate edition), and it allows any configuration changes without a problem with the re-registering ect., whenever I have tried to install a harddrive from one system to another, I get the "BLUE" screen at startup letting me know that the system is shutting down for my own protection as system has changed.

Is there a way to get around this blue screen so that I can allow XP to reconfigure all the new components on the next system?

Anyone with a solution... is greatly appreciated.

Thanks.
 
well the obvious thing is that they will have to do the same thing when they get the drive back.

Look into the remote assistance feature of xp...this will be more practical for you.
 
One possible solution is getting images of the hard drives with a utility like Drive Image and use Image Explorer to modify the image. You can't solve system problems with this method and it's unclear if a virus scanner can scan and find viruses in an image. Another method would be to install the drive in your system as a slave or secondary and use the DOS version of Partition Magic or Drive Image to set the primary bootable partition to inactive. This will allow you to boot with your disk but see the other drive's contents without actually booting with it.
Remote Assistance could work as well but the system you are connecting to has to be somewhat stable as a freeze or crash will obliviously disconect you.
 
Yea...

The remote assistant won't work in many cases.. as a reformat will not work that way. Can you scan across an internet connection to the other computer...? That might be useful in scanning their computers from my location ( to help with virus's). I'd have them do the scan's, but lately the virus's they have been getting are disabling the Antivirus software (getting more and more common).

I am pretty sure there is a way to get around the blue screen. Just need to find the right pill.
🙂
 
Yes.... it does not let you get that far. Windows98 was no problem usually as long as you had the driver software handy when you installed the hard drive into the new system.

Anyone know how to get around this problem using WinXP?

Thanks..
 
I've been looking for an answer to that same problem for a while, but so far no luck. It's not just if you want to fix other people's systems, I want to do something similar to set up new systems. I want to create a 'standard' image, then when I build a new system, apply the standard image, re-activate/register etc, and install anything specific to that particular PC (device drivers or programs). This would save a lot of time having to do stupid installations from scratch on each new PC I build.

Ghost and Drive Image will let you create the images and apply them to machines with the same hardware, but they don't work when the hardware is changed significantly.

Anyone else have any techniques they use for this kind of scenario?
 
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