Replacing your hard drive and Product Activation

If you replace your hard drive and then use 3rd party software such as Acronis to move the content of your old drive to the new drive, will Windows XP or Vista need to be re-activated? How about other software that use copy protection?

 

hmm I think so you don't need to activate for HDD change but still its very easy to activate

 

Yes it will probably complain and want to reactivate. You shouldn't have any issue though using the automated activation.

 

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I've had it happen or not happen depending on the machine and the drive.

Things more likely to kick off a reactivation include different drive manufacturers and replacing a small drive with a larger drive--especially if you resize the system partition to use the entire larger drive

 

It may, depending on how much else has been changed, as gerryf19 said; however, I have changed hdds on two systems, an _HP and a _Sony VAIO (the VAIO three times ), and have used Acronis True Home to clone the old drive to the new, and have never had XP demand that it be reactivated.

Ultimately, XP will demand reactivation if enough of the system components have been changed that it no longer gets enough "votes" from recognized components to let it know that it's still on the original equipment on which it was installed and activated.

A more detailed discussion of how it works is in this Microsoft whitepaper, Technical Details on Microsoft Product Activation for Windows XP, and on page 4 of that whitepaper is a table - Table 1 - that lists the components XP polls every time it fires up.

Unless you've done a number of different component upgrades, in particular changing the NIC (not just using an adapter instead of the built-in NIC, but removing the original built-in NIC altogether), and the RAM, and the CD/DVD drive, for example, you most likely won't have any problems using Acronis to clone the old hdd to a new hdd and then swapping out the hdds.