Activating XP With New HDD

I'm thinking of purchasing a Raptor 74gb for my Op to run and programs then using the current 80gb as a drive for games and MP3's etc. If I install the raptor I will have to activate XP again but I don't know if it'll registor. The last time I did it was the 29th December 2005 it's an official OEM I've had it for 3 years.

I won't be getting the drive for another 2 weeks or so I was going to buy a raptor install it on this PC. Than at the end of the year when I can afford AM2 I was going to take out my optical drives, hard drives & PSU to put into my new rig. They save the board and 2500+ and rebuild it later on if I want to.

All I have to save up up for would be an AM2 board, DDR2 memory, PCI-E card & AMD64 chip hopefully X2.

Microsoft should let you activate your key about 5 times, so you should not have any issues. If you try to activate it and it will not take the activation, usually you can just call them on the phone and do it over the phone. They usually ask you why you are activating it and how many machines it's been installed on. As long as it's only on one machine, they are pretty good about activating it over the phone. I do it all the time at work with people's machines and never had a problem activating it over the phone.

There is really no reason why you can't do exactly what you described. You bought the OS, and you are doing minor hardware changes(and as thalzar said, you have plenty of options). This activation crap seems to get everyone more agitated than needs to be. For Gods sake, its not like you are changing everything weekly.

I don't think activation on a new drive will be a problem. I had a box that had several installations done (always deleting partitions & recreating them) with Windows Setup. The last few times activation required a phone call.

The next time I did a low level format with Killdisk (which overwrites hidden MS files that remain on the drive even after the partition(s) are deleted) and there was no activation needed other than the simple online click. It acted like the OS had never been activated before.

El<(')>Maxi said:

I don't think activation on a new drive will be a problem. I had a box that had several installations done (always deleting partitions & recreating them) with Windows Setup. The last few times activation required a phone call.

The next time I did a low level format with Killdisk (which overwrites hidden MS files that remain on the drive even after the partition(s) are deleted) and there was no activation needed other than the simple online click. It acted like the OS had never been activated before.

Click to expand...

I don't know about hidden files; there are plenty of disk utilities that will wipe a drive clean. But there are time periods that seem to add activations. Every six months are so you are allowed another activation. I have an MSDN subscription and if a few months go by there is no problem doing an activation over internet. After all, Microsoft knows that you need to format their OS every 8 months or so. They're just trying to make sure that folks pay for the OS, and being a programmer, I can hardly blame them. I like to get paid too.