I have a 40 GB hard drive loaded with windows xp home that has been converted to an external hard drive and an old emachines 333i loaded with windows 98 that crashed. I'm wondering if I bring the 32 bit DDRam up to minimum system requirements for xp if I can instal the 40 GB hard drive into the older machine and it will work without any other major modifications? If so will it operate fast enough with the processor speed so close to the minimum requirements or will it be too slow to bother with. Thanks.

windows doesnt like being out on another pc. Its an antipiracy measure. Generally after putting it in a different pc, or a motherboard upgrade, it will need a full or repair reinstall.

and 64mb ram is NOT enough for it to run well.

my laptop has 128mb / 600mhz and runs xp fairly ok , with tweaking e.g turning off unnecessary services, effects, themes

256 is better though.

The answer to this is never straight forward. In actuality you can. But realistically NO.
1 the hard disk when powered on in the old PC will start to recognized ALL the hardware attached and will require drives in some case (headache here) if and when you get that done you would have to activate the software again. you need the key and it still might not activate because the Key is stored at Microsoft with a specific machine code the first time you activate. and base on the spec on this Windows PC definitely a NO

Thanks guys, that is what I needed to know. I was hoping for an EZ fix to the problem and that almost never works. I'll read some more posts and try to come up with some other off the wall uses for the old broken beast.

you can always put a HDD in the old beast and use it for some other reason test, printer server, as an archive/backup just about anything.

i use one to hold the barn door open .

Yeap! u can put your 40GB hard drive into your old system provided that your system meets the hardware requirements, i.e the hardrive is 32bits and your system is compatible to that. You'll have to configure it for Win98 since most of the old system hardware doesn't meet the basic requirements WinXP!

Well, I have reinstalled win 98 SE in the old beast that had crashed and upgraded it to 256 MB RAM. I'm still weighing options on wiping the 40 GB drive and installing it. I had hoped it would plug and play but alas that was not to be, I tried. I have my original recovery discs for both the XP computer that is gone and the 98 computer so I could probably work around the driver issues but I don't have my product code for the XP and can't figure out how to get it out as it is not the main operating system and none of the code finders I've tried will recognize it in its external configuration. I may try plugging it into another computer running XP that I own in hopes that it could be opened up but have strong doubts that that will work either.

Does anyone know if slaving it to another operating system running XP would work as far as digging the product code out? I really want to run XP on all machines if possible without having to repurchase an operating system I've already paid for. It wouldn't be such an issue if M$ hadn't dropped every operating system released prior to XP, but they did and now I'm in a quandry.

the product code isnt on the cd itself, its stored on the computer

all xp cds are the same (in fact, any valid product key would work, but that would be illegal)

Yeah I know the product code isn't on the cd but it is recorded somewhere on the hard drive that XP is installed on. My 40 GB drive still has all its info still on it and somewhere in that is the product code. It has to be found and decoded and all the product code finders that I have found aren't able to pull that code from an external drive, only the main operating system. Since I don't have the original computer that the hard drive came from, motherboard died along with most of the rest of the computer, I can't set up the hard drive as the main operating system to pull off the product code. I don't have the original case with the product code, yeah I screwed up, but at the time I was worried about the info on the drive and didn't know how important the product sticker would be if I wanted to use the hard drive again. So I'm just trying to find a legal way to pull off my product code on a OS I paid for. I realize that I have other XP systems with valid codes but using those would not be legal. If nothing else I will install 98 on it and wipe the original 4 GB hard drive so I'm not double installed. I can always use the 4 GB as an external minus the OS.