Moving xp hard drive to a vista computer

[lokiie1984]

Xp computer

AMD athlon 64x2 3600 (two CPU's at 1.9GHz each)
Radeon 4670 1gig
3gigs of ram
Windows XP
Unknown motherboard
300gig hard drive (im not sure on the specifics on the brand or type)

Vista computer

AMD Athlon 64x2 5000 (two CPU's at 2.6 GHz each)
Geforce 9500 GT
4gigs of ram
Vista home 6.0 (im not sure if its a 32 or 64)
500watt power
300gig hard drive (also not sure on the specifics)

I want to make the xp drive the master as i just cant stand vista at all. Plus my xp drive has some programs and files that i dont have cds for and would have to download to replace and with my slow internet (150kb/s max) it would take days.

Is it possible to switch drives like that? Or at the very least make the xp a back up and transfer the programs i want over to the vista drive?

Also is there an easy way to find out of the version of vista is 64 or 32 bit?

Edit: Looks like it is a 64 bit if that matters.

 

[kenrivers]

You are talking about making the XP drive the primary (master) drive in the Vista machine, correct? You should be able to switch the drives but you will have to find XP drivers for the motherboard and other devices.

 

[daswilhelm]

reload the vista drive with xp, cant just plop a drive in another system and expect it to work

 

[lokiie1984]

I cant load xp onto the vista drive, i would rather do that but my xp cd has disappeared quite a while ago. I assume it was placed into the wrong case then thrown out or something over the years.

And yea Kenrivers, my plan would be to either remove the vista drive all together or make the xp drive the master so when i boot up i will be using xp rather then vista. But i may just have to leave it as is.

Would i still have to go through all of that if i were to make the xp drive a secondary? At least then i wouldnt have to download all my large programs again.

 

[swifty_morgan]

did you disconnect the Vista drive and try booting using the XP HD ? Might not work. Windows may look for the mother board or other hardware changes and not boot......... or it will boot to the desktop and ask to validate or something.

Try the drive alone in safe mode. maybe it'll get to the desktop and you can load drivers.

Or you can make the drive a slave drive and boot machine and move your wanted programs onto the Vista drive.

I'll leave it there for now.

 

[kenrivers]

I don't see why you can't add the XP drive as a secondary drive, however to use the programs you used under XP you will have to reinstall them on Vista. Just make sure if it is not cable select you set the jumper on the XP drive to slave.

 

[lokiie1984]

I don't see why you can't add the XP drive as a secondary drive, however to use the programs you used under XP you will have to reinstall them on Vista. Just make sure if it is not cable select you set the jumper on the XP drive to slave.

Damn, that's what i was afraid of, guess i will have to spend some time downloading.

If i were to just stick it in (pulling out the vista drive) and boot it up in safe mode, assuming it doesn't work would it damage the drive/computer in anyway?

 

[kenrivers]

If you simply switch the drives it should not cause any damage to the drive or computer. You need someone with more experience than I to answer the question about safe mode.

 

[dudewitbow]

Is it OEM XP or retail XP. it does make a difference.

 

[lokiie1984]

i would assume retail but im not really sure.

It is at service pack 3 if that helps

Edit: After looking up what OEM meant, it is retail. I had bought it from a friend years ago when he upgraded. It wasn't a boot leg copy or anything either. Speaking of which, at the time i had actually downgraded from vista (wiping the drive and then installing xp)

 

[Supermuncher85]

If you simply switch the drives it should not cause any damage to the drive or computer. You need someone with more experience than I to answer the question about safe mode.

There is no way it will boot even in safe mode. It will give a general error along the lines of "hardware has changed, want to attempt repair?" Yes ok and it will then, attempt to repair for 4 hours and will eventually just hang. I've never ever succeded in doing this, believe me I've tried. In worst case scenario, the "repairs" will make the XP then 100% unusable even when you swap it back to the old computer.

Now if you are looking for a simple way of using a single keyboard/mouse (screen?) with the other computer there are several options you can do:
1.) That I've used many times is setting up a VPN using either remote desktop or VNC
2.) You can use a KVM switch
3.) Use something like Synergy or Mouse without borders

These are my simple fix solutions that require minimal effort or implementation time. If you want to use your new hardware however running XP, chances are you won't get around doing a parallel install of windows XP or nuking the vista drive completely.

Edit: If for some miracle reason the motherboards are very similar, same chipsets used etc. It might work with a swap, but I'd do a full drive backup before attempting a repair install on the other machine, since as mentioned the drive could become completely unusable after windows repair does its thing!

 

[swifty_morgan]

if you haven't taken the Vista drive out( diconnected ) and installed the xp drive and tried to boot by now we all must be wasting time. it's not going to hurt anything but will gain you/us knowledge.

 

[lokiie1984]

I put it in and it did boot up just fine, im having to download a couple drivers but so far its working fine. I do get an error on boot up but it flashes pretty fast and i only see it for second before its gone and then windows starts up. Something about boot.ini i think.

Once i update the mother board drivers im going to see if i can get a better look at it.

 

[Supermuncher85]

Good to hear that it works, but do make a backup! 😀

If you find your install CD you can plop it in, select repair and then use "bootcfg /rebuild" to get rid of the error.

 

[lokiie1984]

Looks like the error is invalid boot.ini but its still too fast for me to read the whole thing, is it something i should be worried about or just ignore?

the other thing im getting is in my device manager its showing to devices as unknown and it wants me to install drivers for them, but i have no idea what they could be.

Looks like one was my audio card, it found drivers while scanning the internet. The other it cant find anything for, it does say its on a pci bus though, any idea what that could be?

 

[swifty_morgan]

the device manager.......... if there are things different on the "old" xp machine of course there will be need for up dates. right click on them and update drivers. if they can't be found look on the net yourself ( google )

 

[lokiie1984]

Spent most of the day tinkering with it, got the boot.ini error fixed and everything seems to running smoothly i was even able to put the old vista drive back in a second hard drive too.

All in all i think its going to work out well from what i can tell.