Replacing laptop hard drive.. Advice needed.

Mmartin_47

Have a friend and apparently her laptop HD is going bad. I told her to back up all her files to an external HD that I let her borrow. Now the thing is when I do replace the hard drive with a brand new one, will Windows XP Pro attempt a reactivation? She claims the laptop was given to her from a family relative.

Any other suggestions on what to do? Are there any programs that can migrate the data over?

SWM

If the hard drive is still working, boot the computer on a bootable CD such as Bart, and use a imaging program such aas Symantec Ghost. Create the image file on an external HDD and then replace the internal drive. Restore the image again using Ghost and you should not even need to activate windows, as the total hardware change is minimal and should be enough to bypass the activation process.

Good luck

dynamik

Do you have the key? It's really not a big deal to reactivate. If it doesn't go automatically, just call MS and tell them you had to reinstall, and they'll approve your activation. If you need to retrieve the key from what you have installed, use the magic jellybean keyfinder (google it).

For files and settings, look at the files and settings transfer wizard (FAST) or the user state migration tools (USMT).

Imaging would be the easiest solution, but it could cost you $50-60 if you need to buy an app. A new drive might require another activation anyway. It did with one I just swapped out.

Mmartin_47

Ah ok thanks for your suggestions. I have Ghost Enterprise. Probably will use that.