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General discussion

Input Needed : Building My Computer

Jul 22, 2005 12:18AM PDT

Hi,

I had an old gateway system with Athlon 700 slot A, now I am building my own system with Athlon 64 2800+ and ASUS K8N motherboard and Kingston PC2700 512 Mb Ram, I am planning to remove my secondary Hard Drive (which I upgraded) from my gateway system which has my XP installation and try that as a primary on the new system that I am configuring, do you see any issues with this. Please send in your suggestions before I start on it. Also the motherboard supports RAID 0/1 with SATA support, but I will be using my IDE as primary, will that cause any issue.

Thanks for your input in advance.

Discussion is locked

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Moving an XP installation
Jul 22, 2005 10:09AM PDT

The first thing you will experience is that XP will not boot in your new system. This is because of the sudden hardware changes. It is possible to do a repair installation to correct this but probably not with your Gateway media. The repair installation option is available with a genuine XP disk from Microsoft and, if the repair installation is successful, it generally preserves your programs and data but rebuilds Windows specific components. You will also need to have your MB and other hardware drivers handy as XP will probably not have all of them. This is a risk so backup what you cannot afford to lose. The RAID and SATA support will not affect you if you do not use it but if you don't load the drivers they will be flagged as non functional in your hardware configuration. You may as well load the drivers anyway.

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Moving an XP Installation. Memory Upgrade
Jul 25, 2005 3:13AM PDT

Hi,

I have a XP installation disk professional edition, not the OEM, so shall I start it with the Repair installation even before I boot from the hard drive. One more question, if I use PC2700(in 1st Bank 512M) and PC2100(in 2nd and 3rd Bank 256 M each), will there be an issue, the MOBO says it can support that configuration, let me know if it cause any bottleneck, at this time I am happy if my Memomry operating bus is at 200+ Mz, because this is an machine I am putting for my brother who might use it for just for gaming and browsing purposes.

Thanks

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Moving an XP Installation. Memory Upgrade
Jul 25, 2005 3:29AM PDT
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This one I cannot answer
Jul 25, 2005 5:49AM PDT

When XP is installed, the media has a "volume name". This has some identifying criteria such as whether it's a full version, upgrade, OEM, etc. I would have to think the repair installation must be done from similar media and that you will be asked for the product ID. That ID should match what's stored on your system already. The other poster's question about your RAM may be correct. In most cases, mixing RAM of dissimilar performance characteristics cannot be recommended. If it works, all modules will run at the speed of the slowest.