Re: Moving hard drive to another machine

From: Ron Martell (ron_at_onlinehelp.bc.ca)
Date: 07/15/04 

Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2004 19:43:06 GMT

"Art" <notaname@notanisp> wrote:

>The user has an HP notebook that she's disposing of. We want to move the
>entire contents of her hard drive to a desktop computer after which her
>present notebook's hard drive will be formatted so that the XP (Home
>edition) will be removed from the notebook.
>
>We cloned her notebook's HD to an external hard drive and then cloned the
>latter to the internal HD on the new desktop computer. Naturally it will not
>boot to a Desktop nor boot in Safe Mode, as we anticipated. The problem is
>that when we boot with the new XP install disk (new retail version of XP
>Home), there's no Repair install facility available. XP doesn't "see" the
>previous Windows installation; it just sees the formatted partition and will
>only allow us to make a new install of the OS on that partition, or delete
>the partition. We assume that this is because the XP OS on the desktop
>computer's drive is an OEM version.
>
>Is there any way around this dilemma? I note we can access the Recovery
>console from the XP install disk. I wonder if there's some way to achieve
>the objective through that avenue? Any help would be appreciated.
>
>Art
>

Boot the new desktop machine with a Windows 98 Startup Disk and then
run

FDISK /STATUS

Does it show any partitions at all on the drive?

You could also try using MBRWORK from the free utilities section at
www.bootitng.com

I have used it before to find "lost" partitions on a hard drive.

Good luck

Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada 

-- 
Microsoft MVP
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca
"The reason computer chips are so small is computers don't eat much."

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