Old hd new system

Question

yeah, I have a one harddrive that I used on my older computer(hp pavilion) my question is...... can I used this harddrive in my newer Dell optiplex gx240?   From experience....I think I can.  See, the older hd is xp home (hp pav) but the newer computer used xp pro (dell).  Its only the operating system.  Can I be wrong?  Can Dell be using their own style of xp dedicated to Dell.  I think I may be wrong.

Dev Mgr · Answer

If you jumper the drive for cable select the drive should work fine.

However, Windows XP (home or pro doesn't make a difference) cannot be expected to work when the drive is moved to a different system model. This is due to the difference in the storage driver/controller. It may work if the installed driver happens to work on both controllers. Some people have reported that if it doesn't work (will usually boot to a blue screen with an inaccessible boot device), you can boot to the XP CD and select to repair the OS, feed it the drivers (on floppy) and then see if it will boot.

speedstep · Answer

The drive physically will work fine. However even if it boots which I doubt it will complain about product activation. XP works on specific machines for specific vendors.

gmc92sierra · Answer

So......what am I to do?  I just can't.... can't delete my old hd.  It's a 200gb.....I already have a hundred gb used with movies, songs and programs.   What can I do to save my old hd and be put in the dell?  Oh and thanks for your replies.

peterfelgate_ce40d3 · Answer

You could add it as a second IDE hard drive (e.g. as d:).  Jumper the ex-HP drive for cable select, put it onto the middle connector of the IDE cable connected to the existing hard drive; then go into bios and do an NVRAM reset.  Make sure the drive is detected OK in the bios.  Boot to the original drive and the second ex-HP drive should show up in 'My Computer' so you can access the files on it.  If you have a SFF case post back for more info in this case (no pun intended...).  Alternatively, put the drive in an external USB 2.0 case; I am not sure if the GX240 has USB 2.0 ports - if not, add a USB 2.0 PCI card to gain this capability.

speedstep · Answer

@gmc92sierra wrote:
So......what am I to do? I just can't.... can't delete my old hd. It's a 200gb.....I already have a hundred gb used with movies, songs and programs. What can I do to save my old hd and be put in the dell? Oh and thanks for your replies.

Get a Full version of XPSP2. If its a Dell I would get a Dell version the Green CD. Boot from the Green Dell XPSP2 retstore CD and do a "repair install". You do this by booting from the cd. It will ask you if you want to do automatic repair. You say NO. Then it says do you want to do a new install. You say Yes and tell it to install on C:\ It will then say it found a copy of XP on C:\ and offer a "repair" install. Then you say yes do a repair install. You will need to know what the administrator password is or the account for an administrator on that machine. You can do this with Full Retail XPSP2 or a Dell Restore CD for XPSP2. If it asks for Activation you can call microsoft on the phone and they will walk you through activation after they get your credit card info.

Message Edited by SpeedStep on 11-12-200611:23 AM

Storage, Drives & Media

Old hd new system

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