Thursday, November 11th, 2004
Installation Notes
My friend Ray recently had to reinstall Windows XP on a new hard drive and encountered some problems. This is how he got around it.
I want to remember how to do this, should I ever have need to, so I'm pasting the information in here.
I have just gone through the process of trying to upgrade my home PC to use a larger disk drive. It appears that the Windows XP operating system detects when you have changed your hard disk and will not allow you load windows. After several hours of research and attempts I have discovered a path that works:
- Connect your new drive (in my case 80GBbyte) as a slave drive and format the disk using a basic partition. Do not use a logical or dynamic partition.
- Run a program called sysprep with the "reseal" option. This tells windows xp to reathenticate your software when you reload windows.
- Run Norton Ghost (or another disk image program) to image your existing drive to the larger drive. Don't forget to set the "make drive active" option. Otherwise, you cannot boot from your new disk drive.
- Shutdown your computer and disconnect your old drive and connect your larger drive to the primary cable.
- Restart your computer
- You should then be presented with the windows initial authentication screen and you will have to reenter your authentication code.
- You should then be able to logon to windows.
- You will also need to reactivate your Microsoft Office software.
The sysprep program is found in the deploy.cab file on the source windows xp cd in the tools directory. This program is what prepares the disk image for deployment to other machines. Without using this Windows XP will detect that you have changed your hardware and will not let you load windows from your new drive.
Thanks Ray!
~Jason
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