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Moving HDD from laptop to laptop

By marcson98 ·
I have two older laptops. One is a HP Xe2 Omnibook and the other is a Twinhead P90. The HP has a 40GB drive and I want to put it into the P90. When I fire up the P90 with it installed it won't get past the first BIOS info screen. It recognizes the drive, as the new size is shown on the screen, but elsewhere in the BIOS it lists the HDD as having the old 8063 MB size limit. LBA is enabled. The 40 GB drive is loaded with Win2kPro and many programs. I don't want to have to reinstall them again by formating the drive from scratch. Any ideas on what I need to do to just install this Win2k HDD into the P90 laptop with only having to update some drivers? I was thinking it would be like moving a 9x or Win2k HDD from Desktop to Desktop, but not so. It's also not a jumper problem. It's probably just something simple that I'm not thinking of. Any suggestions?

Why bother ????

Because the P90 has a very clear native resolution screen of 800x600 pixels, and many of the programs are golden oldies that need this resolution to work nicely.

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Best guess is that the BIOS in the P90 doesn't support the larger HDD.

by OH Smeg Moderator In reply to Moving HDD from laptop to ...

Back in the old IDE Days the BIOS has a Upper Size Limit for Drives that it can recognize so if you exceed this limit the M'Board can not fully see the HDD.

Also you may need to scan the HDD or manually enter the CHS Settings Cylinder Head Sectors into the BIOS and save the changes as you exit the BIOS. Here it all depends on how the BIOS works so you'll need to grab the Manual and read the BIOS Setting Pages.

As for switching the HDD it's not going to work if it has Windows on it as the HAL Hardware Abstraction Layer which is built during the Install Process will be wrong and you'll at the very least have to do a Repair Install but more likely a New Install of th OS you want to use here.

Col

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The larger drive is supported.

by marcson98 In reply to Best guess is that the BI ...

What I decided to do is this. The P90 already had Xp on it. The problem is that the laptop is pretty old and was really not made for more than a 9x system, so it is kinda slow. Also some of these golden oldies need a 9x system. What I did was to copy the disk to the new 40GB disk and I'm just going to add the programs manually. The disk works, albeit a little slow. There are a few programs that won't run on Xp, but most of them do. So that is that. The 40GB drive does run on the P90. I copied it using XXclone and a few different 3.5" to 2.5" drive adapters on my desktop system. Thanks for the help. I appreciate the input.

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License Issue

by TheChas In reply to Moving HDD from laptop to ...

While this is not why one laptop does not boot with the hard drive from another, moving Windows installations from one laptop to another may violate the EULA.

The Windows license for nearly every OEM version of Windows is tied to the original hardware. Your Windows 2000 license is tied to the HP Omnibook and cannot be used on another computer. Technically in fact, it cannot be used with a different Omnibook.

Newer OEM versions of Windows will not boot or install if the hardware from a different manufacture. I don't believe that Microsoft had initiated this feature for Windows 2000.

If you have the retail version of Windows 2000, then you should be able to install it on a different computer so long as you disable the installation on any other computer it is installed on.

As Oh Smeg has said, you do have a hardware issue that needs to be resolved before licensing will be an issue.

Chas

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