can someone help. I am trying to take my hard drive with win xp and all my personnel stuff and trying to run it on a faster pc, but i cannot get it tio run. pc goes through bios set uo ok, the disk is detected but windows does not start up. am i doing something wrong. when i put the hard drive back in the original pc it is ok.
someone told me that you cannot run a hard drive with xp on any pc other than the one you used to install xp because of security features, is this true.

many thanks.

someone told me that you cannot run a hard drive with xp on any pc other than the one you used to install xp because of security features, is this true.

Someone would be correct, however it may be possible to Clone your Drive to another and or do a Repair install to do what you want here is a link to help you with that from PcStats http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=418

Before you swap out the current motherboard go to device manager and select the IDE ATA/ATAPI Controller and select your current storage controller. Right click, select update driver and select install from a list or specific location. Click don't search I will choose the driver to install and select the standard dual channel IDE controller.

This will prevent the inaccessable boot device blue screen. I have done this multiple times on different platforms with no problems.

Also I found that booting the first time with the new motherboard is best done in the Safe mode where XP will install the drivers it needs and at the same time you can install the new motherboard drivers from its CD.

This saved me doing a repair or a reinstall of XP. My whole system came right up and worked great and very stable.

I did this when I put a new motherboard with an old hard drive running XP and it worked fine just had to reactivate xp and that was done online no problem, I'm running XP home OEM