Windows To New Hard Disk

[Robie]

I built my self a computer a year or so ago but stupidly didn't take advantage of the SATA-II capabilities of my motherboard by buying a normal hard drive. On this I installed Windows Media Edition OEM which I bought with the computer parts and still have the disks for.

More recently I bought a SATA-II hard disk but have chickened out of installing it incase Windows refuses to activate on the new hard disk. Another option is to use the new hard disk as a slave but I would still not be getting the most out of my hard drive.

Have any of you got any experience with OEM software and upgrading components? If so can you tell me what steps I should do to make sure I dont pay for ignoring the saying "If it aint broke...".

[Jamesb4uk]

there shouldnt be too much to worry about. Changing the disk - i think if it picks up motherboard/CPU then it blocks the install.

unplug your old drive & install the OEM on the new disk. That way if it mess's you around you can revert back.

Otherwise you will have to use a Partition Manager to copy the old disk to the new one - such as Paragon partion manager

J

[Robie]

Thanks James, I'll give it a go soon

[selfbuild]

Easier way would be to use Norton Ghost and clone it....

None of this reinstalling everything and you won't lose anything either. Once complete, unplug your old drive and let it boot from the Sata drive. If your happy that everything is ok, then you do what you want with the old drive.

[YarisT]

As far as reinstalling or repairing is concerned it will want reactivating, you haven’t had any major component changes so it should reactivate online, though if it doesn’t a quick call to Msoft and they will reactivate over the phone.

Easier way would be to use Norton Ghost and clone it....

None of this reinstalling everything and you won't lose anything either. Once complete, unplug your old drive and let it boot from the Sata drive. If your happy that everything is ok, then you do what you want with the old drive.

The above is what I would do but the problem with that is your cloning from IDE to SATA, even if the driver for the SATA controller is installed on the OS it wont be the boot Mass storage controller so it probably wont boot and you will have to do a repair install - even with doing that it would still get you back up and running with all your settings intact a lot quicker the a fresh install.

[Jamesb4uk]

Besides - a new install will be a LOT quicker & give him a chance to get rid of any stuff he dowsn't want

J

[Robie]

Cheers for the concise advise guys. Yes indeed I do have a lot of cack on my computer (who dosen't) so a format every year is not unusual. This year though I'll just install a new hard drive and cherry pick what I want off my old one :D

Cheers for the help

[Robie]

Excellent it worked. I didn't take the jumper out of the original hard disk and the computer kept powering down when I opened the DVDRW drive so I guess it was the jumper or maybe a dodgy power lead thing which I swapped with a now redundent DVD player.

Had the usual struggle of finding the drivers I needed for my Soundblaster 7.1 soundcard but now it's done my music never sounded better

I can just grab whatever I want off my old hard disk and windows runs faster on this new hard disk. I still have the hunger for more ram. 2GB at the moment so I might upgrade that with a second graphics card (probably 2nd hand) in SLI and get into video editing.

Cheers for your help guys