NeXT
Veteran Member
I have a T30 Thinkpad which had its drive die a number of years back and I was forced to throw in any drive I had on hand to get it up and running again. Well I lost the Performance Lottery and must of picked the noisiest and slowest 40gb I've ever had to deal with so I activated XP, applied all my drivers, patches and loaded my software again and have been tortured by that until I finally found another 7200rpm 80gb drive.
I don't have a whole heck of a lot for modern disk cloning and imaging tools and most of them without custom scripts I've always fought with and lost so I had another idea that in theory should of worked fine:
-Used Windows Backup and an external hard drive to back the entire system up
-Power down and swap drives
-Put a fresh install of XP Professional down and blow through the setup to get back to the desktop
-Plug in the external hard drive and overwrite the new install with the backup, then reboot
-System comes back like nothing changed
Well the plan was 90% successful. The system is WAY faster now and it booted back up with no driver or file errors so it did it's job.....but then WGA chimes in that there was a major hardware change and wants me to re-activate again.
:I
It was a hard drive change. You aren't even a different computer. Don't give me that crap. At least don't give me that crap now that Microsoft no longer does instant online activation. The install and the key are both genuine but the phone-in is a slog. Now that the system is transferred over I'm going to try writing the backup over it again and see if it will shut up about whatever is pissing off WGA but is there any idea what would actually] make it mad like that?
I don't have a whole heck of a lot for modern disk cloning and imaging tools and most of them without custom scripts I've always fought with and lost so I had another idea that in theory should of worked fine:
-Used Windows Backup and an external hard drive to back the entire system up
-Power down and swap drives
-Put a fresh install of XP Professional down and blow through the setup to get back to the desktop
-Plug in the external hard drive and overwrite the new install with the backup, then reboot
-System comes back like nothing changed
Well the plan was 90% successful. The system is WAY faster now and it booted back up with no driver or file errors so it did it's job.....but then WGA chimes in that there was a major hardware change and wants me to re-activate again.
:I
It was a hard drive change. You aren't even a different computer. Don't give me that crap. At least don't give me that crap now that Microsoft no longer does instant online activation. The install and the key are both genuine but the phone-in is a slog. Now that the system is transferred over I'm going to try writing the backup over it again and see if it will shut up about whatever is pissing off WGA but is there any idea what would actually] make it mad like that?