WINDOWS XP Pro Hard Drive issue

[Alps66]

Hello All,
I am working thru an issue that a very large number of fellow computer users are working now (according to all the blogs). That being, when you upgrade your hard drive on a XP machine you get the “disk read Error” message. In my case I have completed the Western Digital mirror process 6 times, with their new software. Each time I get a good mirror image from my old drive to the new drive. Everything works great until I restart the computer the second time (first time works great). Second time I get the read error, if the new drive is primary drive. I swapped the 500GB to be secondary and windows can read just fine.
Low level, high level or quick formats do not correct the problem (new drive is EIDE 500GB). Chkdsk finds no errors on the 500 G drive.

My question to everyone is this. Months ago I read something that said Microsoft was about to install software on our computers (with proper software) that would detect change to configuration of computers. If changes were made, then a new copy of MS windows would have to buy a new copy of Windows. Has any one else hear this?????? It would explain the problem I am having.

[Rik from RCE]

Is your mobo sata 2 compliant? Are you mirroring from sata to sata or from ata to sata?

[Mongo4ME]

Hello All, I am working thru an issue that a very large number of fellow computer users are working now (according to all the blogs). That being, when you upgrade your hard drive on a XP machine you get the “disk read Error” message. In my case I have completed the Western Digital mirror process 6 times, with their new software. Each time I get a good mirror image from my old drive to the new drive. Everything works great until I restart the computer the second time (first time works great). Second time I get the read error, if the new drive is primary drive. I swapped the 500GB to be secondary and windows can read just fine. Low level, high level or quick formats do not correct the problem (new drive is EIDE 500GB). Chkdsk finds no errors on the 500 G drive.

My question to everyone is this. Months ago I read something that said Microsoft was about to install software on our computers (with proper software) that would detect change to configuration of computers. If changes were made, then a new copy of MS windows would have to buy a new copy of Windows. Has any one else hear this?????? It would explain the problem I am having.

The XP licensing issue is not related to your problem. When XP detects significant changes to the pre-existing hardware, it simply require you to re-register/contact Microsoft at their 800 #. This has happened to me many times and re-registering has never been an issue and I have NEVER been forced or even asked to buy a new copy.

[Alps66]

Is your mobo sata 2 compliant? Are you mirroring from sata to sata or from ata to sata?

My Drives are an EIDE 80G to EIDE 500G. But looks like I have corrected the problem. After perform the low level format again, and performing a mirror copy, I went right to Microsoft.com and updated my system. Everything is working correctly now. I have reboot my system 20 times with no read errors. The 500G is the primary drive and 80G is second only for photos.
Not real sure if the web site visit was the cure, but it worked.

[Rik from RCE]

That's good new indeed. :)

[neilkevins]

Hi...
I read your comment as per that i would like to suggest this information so it will useful to you.....It would all depend on how you went about installing windows. If you say you installed it fresh on a new hard drive, then windows should detect the hardware as it is installed. If you simply 'cloned' the computer hard drive then there should not be a problem either, unless the new drive is SATA and the old was IDE as you may need to use a RAID controller which might mean changing the bios settings accordingly for the boot device type.You are correct about a software license and file that is part of the authentication/activation of windows but as stated earlier, if you are cloning the drive there will not be a problem. This sort of thing will only occur if you are moving the hard drive to a computer with new motherboard, etc, as windows will typically recognize the hardware changes but may determine this as requiring re-activation.... Thanks for sharing the post....