New Vista laptop with older XP C drive

[frenchie29]

What I want to do is buy a new laptop and use my harddrive that's in my current laptop (XP), I also have a disk image of it as a backup. The new laptop will come with Vista and my disk image c drive is XP media center Would that work? What I would do is soon as I have the new laptop I would swap the Vista HD with the disk image one. I am just wondering about registration when I will go online. Otherwise I will have to buy media center, if it's still available!!!!

[gvblake22]

The laptop should be able to read the hard drive and probably even attempt to boot Windows XP (maybe even successfully boot it). But I doubt it would run well if it was able to boot into Windows because all the hardware has changed and the drivers from the original install are still looking for the old hardware and it won't know what to do with the new hardware of the new laptop.

Your best bet is to copy all the data you want to a flash drive or external hard drive and partition your new laptop hard drive to dual boot Vista and XP. That means you will have to fully reinstall Vista and XP on the new laptop, then copy all your files over to the install(s) once you've got them up and running with the appropriate drivers.

[Hitman]

You probably won't even be able to install XP on your new laptop. Chances are there are no XP drivers to support the hardware in your laptop.

[azianai]

And please note your old drive MAY be IDE, not SATA which most likely the new laptop will come with.

[frenchie29]

The drive is sata

I want to get a dell 1420 so you are saying even if I wipeout the HD I can't even install XP on it???

[frenchie29]

I contacted Dell and they told me I can wipeout the drive and reinstall XP on it I have XP home XP pro that I bought I have the phisical install disk but my XP media center came with my laptop and all i have is the recovery disk can i use that to install a fresh copy of XP media on a new machine? or I will need to buy another copy of XP??

[gvblake22]

You need the original disk. The Windows install files are possibly on that "recovery disk", try booting from it and see if it will let you reinstall Windows. If you have a CD key for a copy of Windows and you can't find any disk, you can order a replacement disk from Microsoft for a small fee.

[azianai]

You'd also need to slipstream SATA drivers or it probably wont detect your HDDs.

[frenchie29]

Originally Posted by gvblake22

You need the original disk. The Windows install files are possibly on that "recovery disk", try booting from it and see if it will let you reinstall Windows. If you have a CD key for a copy of Windows and you can't find any disk, you can order a replacement disk from Microsoft for a small fee.

I have the key on the sticker on the back of my laptop Does it mean I can order the actual disks? Can I use the same code on both laptop or I have to pay to get a code?

[gvblake22]

Sorry for the delay, kindof forgot about this thread.
Anyway, go here and you might be able to get a new install disk that will use the same CD Key that is on the laptop. Since it is for a laptop that came with Windows from the manufacturer, you might need to contact the manufacturer and get a replacement disk through them instead.