dual booting
DiscoZombie
Join Date: 2003-08-05 Member: 18951Members
Join Date: 2003-08-05 Member: 18951Members
in Off-Topic
<div class="IPBDescription">is it easy?</div>so I got a new PC a few months ago and I'm tempted to put my old PC's HD in there as a second drive. of course most of the games installed on my old PC won't run if I'm not running off of that windows install (right?). If I put in my old PC's HD as the D: drive, would I be able to boot off of it with ease? I'm not even talking about dual booting with linux or something, it's just a different winxp install - I want to be able to play games installed on my old computer that I'm sure I don't have the DVDs for on my new one. what steps would I need to take? Would it be a simple matter of going into the registry at boot and switching the old HD to being the C drive and vice versa? I'm just an intermediate computer guy, which is like being a computer newbie on this board =p
Comments
Edit: <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/kb/289022" target="_blank">This might be of help.</a>
Edit 2: Oh, and what TychoCelchuuu says is partially right. If you just swap the drive over, chances are it'll muck up terribly. However, cleaning out third party drivers before you do so would be a good start. There's actually a way to get Windows XP to adjust itself to a new computer (though most editions will probably start complaining about authentication shenanigans), but I'll be damned if I can remember what it is. You should've asked two years ago, I'd've known then.
You can always try. You should suffer no loss of data even if it doesn't work, at worst you'll get a horribly unstable system or one that just crashes at boot. If that happens, you still have the other OS to boot from.
Serious answer: Hook your old HD up as a slave to the new one. Run XP off the new drive, but copy all your game program files off the old drive onto the new one. You will also probably have to track down and transfer the registry values for those games onto the new harddrive as well. It will be a ######, but it's possible. If you really don't have any of the game disks left this might be your only hope.
I give 7 to 1 odds that Windows XP gives up and commits suicide when you try to boot it on an entirely different computer than it was installed on. Every single driver and device will be 100% wrong. Your best bet is to reinstall XP from scratch.
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lol, I was wondering if that would be the case. I was hoping it might detect the important ones plug-and-play style. I'd fully expect it to boot up in like EGA graphics mode until I installed my video drivers, but that would be easy. maybe I'll just leave my old PC intact if it's not an easy thing to just stick its HD in my new machine and boot off of it.