Swapping Master Drives

[Khutan]

My Dad is comin for a holiday to Thailand and he needs some help with his computer.

I told him to get a friend of mine who is a field engineer from a well known computer company to remove the Hard Drive from his PC, put it in a static bag, then some bubble-wrap and he can bring it here.

My plan then was to put the drive into a desktop here, let device manager do its thing, and I can fix the problems and give him some training. Well that was the idea.....

Now with earlier versions of Windoes, particularly the later version of 98 and ME, you could swap the drive from one machine to another, sevice manager would recognise the devices and away you go.

My worry is with XP, or rather when the drive ir returned to the original machine. Will windows get all upset over the multiple changes in serial numbers from the CPU ?

The only think I was thinking of was to set the serial / model number in the second CPU to be the same as his CPU.

Anyone got any idea if XP will have a problem ?

[monty]

Assuming your dad's XP version is a genuine one, any major hardware change will require re-registration/validation of his windows!

Also, when putting a master drive holding WinXP into another PC you'll run a big risk of simply not being able to start-up. Happens mainly when the mainboards are different.

Blue screen of death will result...

If your dad has broadband internet, a much better solution would be to use remote assistance.

This way anybody (when your dad invites someone anyway) can work on your dad's PC, while your dad is looking on...

[Florin]

I second the Remote Assistance thing, it works great and would save you some hassle...but my experience with swapping HDDs between different computers with Windows XP has also been positive, I've never had a BSOD and everything worked very well.

As for the activation thing...well, you could easily "correct" that problem when the HDD is on your PC with a good serial number