Hi Everyone,
I've tried searching for a solution for this but I have not found nothing exactly identical to my problem.
I have 3 identical PC's (apart from HDD) with 3 copies of Windows XP Pro. As you know it takes a long time to install windows, drivers, updates & applications. Im asking if there is a way to clone one ready PC and then install them on other PC's.

Is it ok as the HDD are different? Also if everything is ok, how do I activate the windows versions with the proper keys?


Thanks in Advance

Hello,

There are several ways to configure the systems. Your best bet if the hard drives are not exactly the same is to use a hard drive cloning program. Take a look at UBCD4WIN (Ultimate Boot CD 4 Windows) It is a free down load that you create on another system using your XP or Vista installation as source to create a Boot CD and there are around 50 utilities for repairing, scannig and copying drives.

Here is a link to a wiki with information on the CD and where to download for free:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBCD4Win

Thanks for the info friend. Ill give this a try!
Will get back to you when finished.

Thanks again

Partition Wizard. Easy as. Free. You can fit to disk or resize partitions on the fly.

Great help. I used partition wizard in the end and it was ready in minutes. As source HD was 500gb, I had to create a partition to match the size of the secondary HD (which was 320gb).

Thanks everyone.

It does make the job easy. Note that it, like most such tools, does its job as a queue on a restart of the sys, so naturally enough they provide a bootable version which has the same capabilities and GUI. Nice.

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