Reinstall?

[Patrick Quinn]

As a person who has ALLWAYS bought his software for the
past 15 years, I am VERY angry right now.

To skip a few details, I am moving my drives with XPHome
to a PIII800 to make room for a new dual Xeon system, and
XPHome on the PIII is stuck in a "will not boot" loop.
Since I have never moved XP to a new processor before, and
know very little about the way they verify ownership now,
I am left twiddling my thumbs while I require access to
the old drives.

Must I request a new instal code? Must I pay for it? Am
I screwed?

[Jim Macklin]

Do a repair or inplace reinstall so that the proper drivers
will be loaded. The system may or may not require
reactivation.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;Q315341&ID=KB;EN-US;Q315341


"Patrick Quinn" > wrote in message
...
| As a person who has ALLWAYS bought his software for the
| past 15 years, I am VERY angry right now.
|
| To skip a few details, I am moving my drives with XPHome
| to a PIII800 to make room for a new dual Xeon system, and
| XPHome on the PIII is stuck in a "will not boot" loop.
| Since I have never moved XP to a new processor before, and
| know very little about the way they verify ownership now,
| I am left twiddling my thumbs while I require access to
| the old drives.
|
| Must I request a new instal code? Must I pay for it? Am
| I screwed?
|
|

[Tom Porterfield]

Patrick Quinn wrote:

> To skip a few details, I am moving my drives with XPHome
> to a PIII800 to make room for a new dual Xeon system, and
> XPHome on the PIII is stuck in a "will not boot" loop.
> Since I have never moved XP to a new processor before, and
> know very little about the way they verify ownership now,
> I am left twiddling my thumbs while I require access to
> the old drives.

Not at all. You've basically pulled the rug out from under XP and put
a it in a completely new environment, without any preparation or
notification to the OS. You can't just completely replace the hardware
that the OS was working in and expect it to come up clean without
problems. XP needs a chance to figure out what the new hardware is
that it now is expected to run on. Often times a repair install over
the existing install will be enough to get things straightened out, so
try that first.

As far as the way the verify ownership, there is nothing that happens
there until Windows is actually running, so that hasn't come into play
yet. At the end of the repair install you will need to reactivate your
copy of XP since it is now on new hardware. Depending on how long it
has been since you last activated XP, that may happen automatically
over the Internet. If not, just choose to activate by phone. It will
be a short call to Microsoft to get a new activation code. Simply
explain what you have done and they will give you a new code with no
hassle.

> Must I request a new instal code? Must I pay for it? Am
> I screwed?

As I said above, you will need a new activation code, but tied to the
same product code. This is free to obtain either automatically through
activation over the Internet or through a quick call to MS.
--
Tom Porterfield
MS-MVP Windows XP & Smart Display
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/tp.porterfield/support

Please post all follows to the newsgroup only

[Patrick Quinn]

One hell of an answer. Thank you. I feel much better
now, BUT..

>Often times a repair install over
>the existing install will be enough to get things
straightened out, so
>try that first.

That's the first thing I tried, and would not boot from
the CD, so I gbot the 6 floppy boot disk. It went ok UNTI
half way through the install where it stopped recognizing
the CD drive. Systematically Searching C: for the files
would take a week.

>As I said above, you will need a new activation code, but
tied to the
>same product code. This is free to obtain either
automatically through
>activation over the Internet or through a quick call to
MS.

You da man.

[Tom Porterfield]

Patrick Quinn wrote:

> That's the first thing I tried, and would not boot from
> the CD, so I gbot the 6 floppy boot disk. It went ok UNTI
> half way through the install where it stopped recognizing
> the CD drive. Systematically Searching C: for the files
> would take a week.

Unfortunately not too uncommon. Again possibly caused by the dramatic
change in hardware. There is another option. Do you have a DOS or
Windows 98 boot floppy that supports your CD drive? If so, add
smartdrv.exe to it, and xcopy if it's not there as well. Boot with the
DOS boot floppy with the XP CD in the drive. Run smartdrv.exe to allow
the copying your about to do to go faster. Use xcopy to copy the
entire i386 directory and all of its sub-directories from the CD to
your hard drive. You'll need to add the appropriate command line
switches to xcopy to get everything, post back if you need help with
that. Once the copying has finished, remove the XP CD from the drive.
Begin the XP repair install by running winnt.exe in the i386 directory
on the hard drive.

This way the repair install is not dependent on the CD drive,
everything is running from the files on your hard drive.

--
Tom Porterfield
MS-MVP Windows XP & Smart Display
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/tp.porterfield/support

Please post all follows to the newsgroup only

[Patrick Quinn]

Ah-ha... this I thought of, but since all drives are of
an NTFS format (not accessable by a machine booted with a
Win98 boot disk), I will have to transfer one of the
drives to my XPPro machine in order to get the CD files on
the drive, right? Or will one of those files make the
Win98 Boot Disk good for booting a machine to read NTFS?
I really don't know, and before I get it all together, I
wanna find out from ya.

[Tom Porterfield]

Patrick Quinn wrote:

> Ah-ha... this I thought of, but since all drives are of
> an NTFS format (not accessable by a machine booted with a
> Win98 boot disk), I will have to transfer one of the
> drives to my XPPro machine in order to get the CD files on
> the drive, right? Or will one of those files make the
> Win98 Boot Disk good for booting a machine to read NTFS?
> I really don't know, and before I get it all together, I
> wanna find out from ya.

Sorry for taking so long to get back, power outage since yesterday.
There are free tools available that allow you to read an NTFS drive.
But the free ones that I know of won't let you write to the drive,
which is what you need to do. Temporarily placing the drive in another
XP machine will work to get the files copied over.

--
Tom Porterfield
MS-MVP Windows XP & Smart Display
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/tp.porterfield/support

Please post all follows to the newsgroup only

[Patrick Quinn]

I forgot to follow up. I'm such a jerk...

That did the trick. T'was a pain it the butt for me,
since I am handicapped and all. I used to be a bench tekk
for larion Car Audio, too. Doesn't that suck? Even the
simple stuff is frustrating...

Anyway, I got XPHome working on #2. Thanks.