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matejcek
09-03-2007, 08:13 AM
I'm building a new PC around a 2.66 GHz Pentium D, on a uATX motherboard. The new system will have a 250 GB SATA hard drive and a SATA DVD writer.

The system will replace an old 500 MHz Presario, running XP Home from a 14GB IDE drive. I'm uncertain about how I'm going to get XP onto the new machine.

I plan to bring the IDE hard drive and an IDE CD writer (and perhaps the floppy drive) from the old system to the new one. I expect that I'll be able to boot XP from the old IDE drive on the new system. But I want to do a clean install of XP on the SATA drive.

The Presario came with W98 preloaded. There came a time when I upgraded it to ME. In time I came to hate ME so much that I rolled it back. Later I bought an XP Upgrade, installed it, and have been using it ever since.

I'm trying to figure out the most pain-free approach to getting a fresh copy of XP running on my SATA hard drive. It's completely legitimate; I own a legal license to XP. But it's an upgrade version, and it isn't going to see an old operating system on the SATA drive.

Here are some approaches that I've thought of:

- Boot from the the old IDE drive, drop in the XP Upgrade CD and tell it that I want to re-install -- but onto the SATA drive. This would be the easiest. I just don't know if it will work. Will the XP installation ask me which drive I want to install on? Will this work?

- Take a 'full' (non-upgrade) XP installation CD from one of the the other systems I have running XP, install it on the SATA drive, then 'upgrade' it -- reinstall it -- using the real, legitimate XP CD for this system. This would probably work.

- Install XP on the SATA drive using one of my other full XP installation CDs, and when it prompts for the product key, use the product key from the upgrade CD. This might work.

I'm not trying to do anything illegal, I'm just trying to move my copy of XP from a years-old workhorse to my new hotshot homebuilt. Any suggestions?

The Wise Monkey
09-03-2007, 01:14 PM
The second option you suggested is probably the best - I've done this before and had no problems.

matejcek
09-03-2007, 02:52 PM
The second option you suggested is probably the best - I've done this before and had no problems.

Thanks very much for the affirmation. It's great to know that I have at least one viable, independently-confirmed approach!

Paul in WI