Switching a 320GB HDD out of a 1555 for a 500GB

Basically tomorrow I will be transplanting my 500gb hdd from my old 1555 into a new 1555 and was wondering if there was anything in particular that I should be aware of when transferring? (I'm aware of minimising all static and also removing all power sources (cable + battery))

Cheers

 

Are you talking about upgrading? ESD isn't a huge concern, use a wrist strap or ground yourself if you are super paranoid.

 

Will you be doing a format and fresh install of Windows, or will you be using the existing Windows installation from the other 1555?

In either case, you will want to deactivate any activation-based software such as Adobe Acrobat, Photoshop, and so on before the swap, on both hard drives. You can re-activate the software once you have booted / re-installed Windows on the new system.

You should also have all of your product serial numbers handy, in case you need to talk to the software manufacturer(s) later for re-activation. If you can't locate all of your original serial numbers, software like Belarc Advisor will tell you your serial numbers for lots of software, but not all.

The reason for this is that some software activation methods use information about the hard drive as one of the ways to tie the software to a particular system. You can get into an ugly situation where the software starts up and decides it is running on a different system and locks itself. That will probably require a call to the software manufacturer's tech support to get a new activation code.

Not all activation-based software allows for deactivation - I don't think there's a way to tell Microsoft Office to deactivate, for example. You'll probably need to use telephone-based activation to re-activate.

Another issue with booting a hard drive that was running in a different PC is that much of the hardware on the new PC will be re-detected and drivers re-installed by Windows, even if it is the "same" hardware. This is normally cosmetic - it just leaves a bunch of old hardware info in the registry. Sometimes hardware like serial ports will be re-numbered because Windows thinks the old hardware might re-appear. In extreme cases, you can wind up with Windows thinking the system drive is something other than C:, which (as you can imagine) confuses both the user and Windows.

 

Thanks for all that information Terry.

I'm reading your post after having already swapped the hard drives. Touch-wood, no software activation problems yet, but I'll have a thorough play around and see if I can find any problems.