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General discussion

20-40-60 what is the difference?

Oct 26, 2004 7:50PM PDT

Hi;

I have two HP machines. When I put my (XP home) from my first machine on a 60 GB hard drive or a 40 GB hard drive and then transfer that hard drive to the second machine, the second machine starts up fine. When I load up my 20GB hard drive and transfer it to the second machine I get just a blank screen. I know that 20 GB is enough to run XP home so what is the problem?

Thanks,
Angela

Discussion is locked

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Re: 20-40-60 what is the difference?
Oct 26, 2004 10:52PM PDT

Angela,

One of two ...

Incorrect jumpers, cabling, bad drive.

Or

Windows product activation preventing O/S
loading as orginal install was on system 1. See:
http://www.microsoft.com/piracy/activation.mspx
Windows XP is primarily licensed for use on a single PC and without purchasing additional licenses cannot be installed on other machines.
_____________________________________________________

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Re: 20-40-60 what is the difference?
Oct 27, 2004 9:24AM PDT

Dear Billzhills;

The drive seems fine I have even put an old copy of Windows 98 from a Monorail machine and that started up. Funny thing is I did have this XP home running on this 20GB drive perfectly until I used Maxtors floppy that comes with the drive to repair the MBR. Now I can no longer get this XP to run on this machine even though I have totally zeroed the drive(presumably any mistakes I made in the MBR were zeroed out).

Thanks;
Angela

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Re: 20-40-60 what is the difference?
Oct 27, 2004 10:13PM PDT

Angela,

If I am reading your post correctly it is system 2 that xp will not install on using the 20gig drive.

What, if any, error messages are you getting.

Other thoughts ....
1. Orginal install of XP on system 1, attempting to install on another system is triggering the anti-piracy feature in XP. Unlike Win9x multi-installs of XP are not possible with single user license.

2. FDISK drive removing all partitions allowing XP to create partitions.

3. System 2 does not meet Hwd requirments for XP.

Sounds like you know your way around inside a case Hopefully others (hint - hint) will share their thoughts about this issue.

Bill
.

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IF the 20
Oct 28, 2004 5:29AM PDT

Has ever been run on an XP machine as a slave, formatted on there ( to clean it off,etc) the XP writes some type of identifier on it so that it will be unuseable as a master boot HD., unless you use a W98 boot floppy ( install 20 as only drive, primary master-) to boot up, then (Having beforehand found and downloaded) use the program called ZAP, (use from another floppy), it will totally obliterate the first 63 sectors/clusters-whatever, allowing you to then use FDISK or something else to make it active,partition it,format etc etc, then write your XP onto it and it should boot-