BleepingComputer.com: Getting my old XP drive to work in my new box

Okay y'all will think this is hilarious because the other day I was asking for opinions about putting new thermal grease on my cpu... didn't do it in time and it fried. So, now I have reluctantly bought a new box with preloaded Vista and not much else. It seems decent with a dual core Intel and a 320gb drive, 3 gb of RAM and so forth.

So I want to continue using my old XP drive, which is only about 2 months old but old style IDE. I've finally gotten them to both show up on the boot menu, and if left to boot with no intervention, it boots from the Xp (ide) disk unless I select the boot menu during startup. I looked at the BIOS but didn't see an option to change that. I'll worry about that later. It's AMI BIOS.

When I boot XP, of course it is not familiar with any of my new hardware, so I can't get online to search for new drivers. I found a "drivers" folder and a "drivers store" folder in the Vista's system32 folder, so I copied that to the root directory on my XP drive. When I use the hardware wizard and point it to those folders, it can't find what it needs. Maybe I need to point to something more specific??? I have no Vista disk, it was all pre-loaded, but I can't use the CDROM with the XP disk anyway. I eventually want to get all this on its own partition on the new drive, but I want it to all work before I screw around with a perfectly good new drive and OS.

Can anyone tell me what I should do to get XP to accept the new hardware? Aren't all those drivers somewhere in the Vista OS?

Thanks,
Rusty

This post has been edited by RknRusty: 09 August 2009 - 02:52 PM

FWIW: Among other things, moving that installation of XP is probably not authorized, even if supported, on that new system...check the license.

Changing a Motherboard or Moving Hard Drive - http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/moving_xp.html

Intel® Application Accelerator - Moving a Hard Drive to a New Motherboard - http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/iaa/sb/cs-009290.htm

Louis

Ouch, that hadn't occurred to me about the license, but that other link makes it look futile anyway. Guess I'll have to learn Vista now. The system came with a free upgrade to Windows 7 anyway, so maybe it'll be better. I'm not sure how that deal works since 7 isn't out yet... I think. Hopefully it'll be a good OS.

Thanks Louis

The Win 7 RC1 is available for anyone to try...many of us have it installed on our systems now.

Vista is passe, as (from what I've read) Win 7 is deemed to be a better O/S.

You may want to download and try it, Welcome to Windows 7 - http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/ and you might also visit the Win 7 forum here at BC.

Louis

I will visit the 7 forum. Mine came advertised as having a free upgrade to 7, but I haven't looked into the details of that yet.

If I create a new partition and download 7, do you think it will be more likely to allow me access to the data on my old drive? I'm still limping until I can get my documents to copy off of the old XP drive. Vista thinks I am a pirate trying to get at my own data and denies access.

I don't want to let it whip me yet though, so may I throw one question at you? Then I'll keep it in the Vista forum. http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/topic248249.html

I can't see the Vista drive in My Computer when I boot the XP drive. I can see the XP drive when I boot Vista though. I've tried both plugs on the old IDE cable and searched for hardware. Any quick ideas on that? I don't know if that would help me get those files or not.

Thanks Louis, I appreciate your help.

Rusty

If you install the RC1 for Windows 7...you will be able to see any preexisting Windows installs (e.g., XP, Vista) that are reflected on the system at that moment.

My guess is that you will like the RC1 install .

Louis

I have solved it in a round-about way; isn't it always. I put my XP drive in an enclosure and plugged it into a USB port. I then put a ubuntu disk in the optical drive and booted it. It could see everything, so I copied and pasted over to the new drive and presto... everything works perfectly. I'm a happy boy :> I wonder if that would have worked if I hadn't made an external drive. Probably.

I still plan to get 7.

Rusty

This post has been edited by RknRusty: 11 August 2009 - 02:58 PM