Major PC Hardware Upgradce

If it works, it works, so congratulations, but you are lucky that the new computer booted at all. Your technique loads a bunch of drivers that were not intended for the new motherboard. If you added new drivers, fine, but are you sure that you got rid of all the old ones? Had you loaded XP from scratch, you wouldn't have to worry about creating an unstable system.

Also, it is legal for you to transfer the old XP installation to a new computer only if you have a retail license for XP, which costs about twice as much as an OEM license. If the old computer is a typical Dell or HP, then it probably has an OEM license. I only bring this up because you do not mention the type of license on the original computer. I have heard of people talking their Microsoft reps into letting them transfer one OEM license to a new computer, but Microsoft is under no obligation to do that, it specifically violates their OEM End User License Agreement.

http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/moving_xp.html

Thanks for the tip on Clonezilla. The last open-source imaging program I tried was an old version of Mondo Rescue, that was flaky enough to justify my purchase of Acronis TrueImage Workstation and Workstation Echo.

I don’t think I needed to get rid of old drivers, so long as they’re no longer being used.

If the drivers are still loading then they are using memory and processor cycles, and they might conflict with other software. Just because you load one driver does not mean that you have unloaded another driver (although that can happen.)

If you are interested, Mark Russinovich's autoruns utility will tell you what is loading, and enable you to decide what gets loaded:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx

But, that could lead to a lot of work. if the computer works and seems stable you may just want to leave it alone. Sounds like you got lucky.

Oddly enough, I tried your technique by mistake earlier this week, when I booted a drive on a new Asus mobo that had been created from an image of a C drive with XP Pro that came from a computer with an older Asus mobo. The computer went into a reboot cycle before I figured out that I had connected the wrong drive.

A recommended step on these sort of transfers is to change the chipset drivers to the generic Windows one before cloning it, and switch to the proper ones on the new system.

Oddly enough WinME was the most tolerant windows of new hardware...I cold swapped a hard drive I was originally planning to nuke and pave from an old 450 mhz box to a new AthlonXP 3000+ based box with nary a hiccup. Wouldn’t have cared if it went to hell, as I said I was really prepared to nuke it and just curious what it would do...since both machines used Via chipsets it went flawlessly.

Pity defective ram in the new box killed it within a few weeks, but the first couple days, damn was it a screamer. Til the bad ram ate it :-)

(To forestall all the ME naysayers..I lost a good number of 2k installs as well to the ram before I got it sorted, so don’t think of blaming the OS...this time.)

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