Bob Harris
December 8th 03, 10:05 PM
First, are you certian that your motherboard BIOS can
handle 300 Gig disks? Many can not. The alternative is a
separate ATA/100 (SCSI, or SATA) controller board added to
a free PCI slot.
Second, by default XP is limited to about 137Gig per
disk. You can change that, if SP-1 is installed, by doing
what it says in the following article:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-
us;303013
However, this assumes that you can get into windows XP.
As a minimum be sure that XP is installed below the 137
Gig boundary. You might want to reseach this issue
further. For safety, consider replacing the non-system
disk fist, and see whether XP can handle that.
In theory you could use GHOST or similar third party
program to copy an image of the a small drive to a larger
one. This requires some playing with master/slave
jumpers. The software you chose should come with further
instructions.
Then, hopefully XP will boot off of the new disk.
Sometimes hardware changes require doing a "repair"
installation of XP. Have your CDROM handy, and of course,
have all personal files backed-up, just in case.
As for activation, merely changing the disks sould not
trigger re-activation. However, if you have done other
things within the lat 3 months or so, the cummulative
effect may require activation. However, that is not a big
deal. Try the on-line activation first. If that fails,
call the 800 number and xplain what you changed. In 5
minutes you should be activated.
>-----Original Message-----
>I'm contemplating a significant hardware change: removing
>both of my current hardrives and installing two new 300Gb
>hardrives. This will require reinstalling xp from cd.
>What will happen when I try to reactivate xp?
>.
>
handle 300 Gig disks? Many can not. The alternative is a
separate ATA/100 (SCSI, or SATA) controller board added to
a free PCI slot.
Second, by default XP is limited to about 137Gig per
disk. You can change that, if SP-1 is installed, by doing
what it says in the following article:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-
us;303013
However, this assumes that you can get into windows XP.
As a minimum be sure that XP is installed below the 137
Gig boundary. You might want to reseach this issue
further. For safety, consider replacing the non-system
disk fist, and see whether XP can handle that.
In theory you could use GHOST or similar third party
program to copy an image of the a small drive to a larger
one. This requires some playing with master/slave
jumpers. The software you chose should come with further
instructions.
Then, hopefully XP will boot off of the new disk.
Sometimes hardware changes require doing a "repair"
installation of XP. Have your CDROM handy, and of course,
have all personal files backed-up, just in case.
As for activation, merely changing the disks sould not
trigger re-activation. However, if you have done other
things within the lat 3 months or so, the cummulative
effect may require activation. However, that is not a big
deal. Try the on-line activation first. If that fails,
call the 800 number and xplain what you changed. In 5
minutes you should be activated.
>-----Original Message-----
>I'm contemplating a significant hardware change: removing
>both of my current hardrives and installing two new 300Gb
>hardrives. This will require reinstalling xp from cd.
>What will happen when I try to reactivate xp?
>.
>