Transferring OS from Old PC to New One

[Lerxt]

Hey Gang, first time poster (and new member) so forgive me if this question has been asked before.

I currently have a Dell XPS with XP Pro and I want to go about building my own system (or upgrading).

The question I have is, can I transfer the OS of my existing PC to the new one? I know apps that come with WD drives and ones like Partition Magic allow you to copy over the entire drive to the new drive so I thought if I do that and put it into the new PC will that work?

I know it sounds messy (I would love to install clean), but I fear that the Dell install discs would probably limit my installing XP on a Dell machine (i.e. the disc only runs the Dell re-install program vs. XP's install program).

So, first, is it possible to copy over my old drive's contents (which has worked when I've upgrade drives, but not entire systems)? And second, if not, can I use the Dell discs to install clean on a non-Dell system?

Thanks in advance.

[chunkylover53]

At least one post that I remembered seeing here on not being able to use Dell (or another manufacturer's) install or restore disks on a new machine, but it wasn't in the Operating system section.

http://forums.mysuperpc.com/showthread.php?t=1062&highlight=windows+xp

I know it's painful to spend $139 on another copy of XP Pro, but that might be your only option if you really want XP Pro. Of course you could do XP Home OEM for about $90, or Vista Basic OEM for less than $100.

Anybody know if he can take the whole hard drive out and use it as his main hard drive in the new system?

[Lerxt]

Thanks - I found the "re-installation" disc and the directory looks like it has the full version of XP but again, who knows what Dell has done to it.

I think moving the contents of the drive to a new PC would require a "reauthorization" as you can't change "primary components" such as the CPU. Anyway, if anyone has been successful installing using a Dell factory disc please let me know (I guess this is becoming more of an OS question).

I did do an install with NT once using an HP factory disk. Basically, I installed DOS first, then installed NT since you couldn't use the boot disk features of the disk (as it was looking for an HP).

[subbu68]

It didn't work for me with Toshiba Disc when I wanted to try XP on my new built PC. It was looking for a particular CD Drive (some number it showed) to start with.

Subbu

[Lerxt]

Just an update for anyone curious about using the Dell disk to install on a non-oem PC - I created a virtual PC using, Virtual PC 2007 and installed XP using the Dell disk, actually event booting from the CD. And it actually worked - now this may not be a big surprise since it's the same computer, but when you examine the Virtual PC - the BIOS is a clone bios, not a dell bios (I checked this using CPU-Z), so if the XP cd was programmed to check for a dell PC, it shouldn't work but in my case it did. Now I did have to activate my version of XP (which I didn't bother to do) but I thought that the Dell Disk would prevent you from even getting past set-up. The next step would be to try it on a new build...