Old Dell is giving me trouble.

[RobertPters77]

This is pissing me off. I'm trying to move over my old circa 2001 dell onto a new machine. The dell is important to me because it has all of my pre-millennial games that wont work with 7 or Later. The HD is dying and I tried cloning it with Apricorn EZ gig software, I tried installing the cloned HD back into the dell and it wont work. I tried again with a different HD and it boots in the Dell but not in another PC.

WTF?

I need the second HD to boot in the new machine badly.

The old dell has P4 2.2ghz, 512mb of ram, intel 845 chipset.
The new PC has an Athlon X2 7700, 3 gigs ram, and an AMD740G chipset.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Bubbaleone]

From your post I'm reading that you were able to clone your system to another HDD that will boot on the old Dell, but not on the new hardware. If that's the case then all you need to do is install that HDD in the new machine and perform a "Repair Installation". In BIOS, on the new machine, be sure to set the optical drive to #1 in the boot order.

[1] Boot from your Windows XP CD. Insert the Windows XP CD into your computer's CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive, and then restart your computer. When the "Press any key to boot from CD" message appears on the screen, press a key to start your computer from the Windows XP CD.

[2] A blue screen will appear and begin loading Windows XP Setup from the CD.

[3] When completed loading files, you will be presented with the following "Welcome to Setup" screen, and your first option. Be sure you select: "To set up Windows XP now, press ENTER", and be sure you DO NOT select: "To repair a Windows XP installation using Recovery Console, press R."

[4] When presented with the screen below, press the F8 key to continue:

[5] Next, Windows Setup will find your existing Windows XP installations. You will be asked to repair an existing XP installation, or install a fresh copy of Windows XP. Select "To repair the selected Windows XP installation, press R."

Note: If you install a fresh copy, all data on that partition will be lost! If no installations are found, then you will not be given the option to repair. This may happen if the data or partition on your drive is too corrupted.

[6] Windows XP will appear to be installing itself for the first time, but it will retain all of your data and settings. Just follow the prompts, and have your CD-KEY ready if needed.

 

[WoodButcher]

[3] When completed loading files, you will be presented with the following "Welcome to Setup" screen, and your first option. Select "To set up Windows XP now, press ENTER". DO NOT select "To repair a Windows XP installation using Recovery Console, press R."

[3] When completed loading files, you will be presented with the following "Welcome to Setup" screen, and your first option. Select "To set up Windows XP now, press ENTER". DO NOT select this option,

select this instead,
"To repair a Windows XP installation using Recovery Console, press R."

You got it right, just a litle confusing. (to me!)

 

[Motorheader]

With the specs of the Dell you gave it is likely that ZZTop recovery is not an issue. It is a Dell OEM windows installation so the key and recovery and/or diagnostic partition are attached to the Dell bios and your original Dell restore disk or system software won't work in the scenario presented. If the system has the original recovery/diagnostic and boot sector in tact then it does check at system boot and will give error even if it does get to windows desktop - invalid system key or you must register windows type of message. A repair installation is not an option in the scenario presented if you are using the original Dell software - you won't have a key.

In addition you are moving from an Intel to an AMD based - which is likely the biggest issue you are having at the moment.

 

[RobertPters77]

With the specs of the Dell you gave it is likely that ZZTop recovery is not an issue. It is a Dell OEM windows installation so the key and recovery and/or diagnostic partition are attached to the Dell bios and your original Dell restore disk or system software won't work in the scenario presented. If the system has the original recovery/diagnostic and boot sector in tact then it does check at system boot and will give error even if it does get to windows desktop - invalid system key or you must register windows type of message. A repair installation is not an option in the scenario presented if you are using the original Dell software - you won't have a key.

In addition you are moving from an Intel to an AMD based - which is likely the biggest issue you are having at the moment.

So you're saying I'm screwed?

I have a copy of Windows XP retail from a decade ago do you think that will help?

 

[Motorheader]

If you have done it this way then you likely can get it working. I've done this multiple times and the only time it didn't work was when the \Windows directory was such a mess that it would run as a repair installation.

Are you moving the drive from ATA/IDE to SATA or is it another ATA/IDE drive? You may have to make sure the bios is setup for IDE/compatibility mode or if you go with SATA you will need to make the F6 floppy disk with drivers. You can incorporate those using NLite when you make the slipstreamed XP disk and you won't have to worry about F6 floppy.

- Make image of failing Dell drive to the hard drive you plan on using in the AMD based system.
- Make your 10 year old Windows XP Retail slipstreamed to same service pack level that the Dell system was at and make a Bootable ISO and burn it to disk - this is also when you can slipstream the F6 SATA AMD drivers into the image. Nlite is the easiest way to do it.
- Take the hard drive you made the failing image from and put it in the AMD based system. Put the WinXP slipstreamed disk into the CD/DVD drive.
- Fire up the system and make sure the bios is setup to boot from CD/DVD first. You will get a prompt that says something like "hit any key to boot from CD drive". Start Windows XP setup and you should be able to do a repair installation as outlined by Bubbaleone. If you don't get the repair installation option you may wan't to stop since it will wipe out your Windows directory and you will likely be starting basically from scratch.

 

[RobertPters77]

Thanks for the help guys. I'm gonna try to do this ASAP because I got so much work.

The new drive is a sandisk 120gb SSD sata3.