JM Are you restoring off the hard drive or a cd? The restores Im referring too come off a partition on the original hard drive and dont require a key. If you are restoring off the original hard drive on the computer you bought I dont see how they can limit your restores, but I suppose they can do anything they want.
Sounds like you're restoring a virgin install of your system from that backup partition? Gives you the pre-authorized WinXP and all the pre-installed apps? What JM's doing is booting from the WinXP CD, formatting the hard-drive and re-installing WinXP and apps one at a time. So he's starting a little earlier than you even and he's gotta deal with that activation mess...grrr. I do what gnome mentioned. I image my working HD to an external backup drive in stages: 1. fresh clean OS install with all updates & patches. 2. OS + commonly used apps installed 3. OS + apps + misc. new stuff It appears that your backup-partition has the #2 image that's being restored on your computer. If things go bad for me, I'll boot up from the external drive and restore the image #2 or #1 and roll it forwards.
I also like to have a stable system cloned on a backup disk. I have gotten burnt by XP also. If both disks are same brand and model it didn't ask for reactivation. If they differed, XP did. I use CasperXP to clone drives and like to clone the drives by installing them in my stable lab machine. The lab machine runs off a SATA drive, well when I installed the two IDE drives, the blasted machine defaulted and booted off the IDE instead of its SATA drive. XP said too much had changed (different Mother Board etc.) and blew the activation on the drive I was trying to clone. It wouldn't work without a fresh activation even after I returned it to it's native machine. XP seems to be heading towards an inability to make backup drive copies without needing reactivation.
I'm going to have to do this too. Once I get Windows Vista, I'm just going to find an application where I can install Windows Vista absolutely fresh, and just freeze it on my HD, so that if something goes wrong (and things always go wrong for me) I can just somehow make that stuff load up and then I won't have to re-activate windows. Especially if Windows Vista starts sucking, I might be going back and forth between Linux and Windows again. Just too much of a hassle. The sad thing is, they still haven't stopped people from pirating their software... they practically give it away for free to anyone with any computer knowledge on the subject. But yes, i was reinstalling Windows XP from the XP disc, so what you might be doing might not have any affect on it. Just be sure if Windows tells you to re-activate your product, that it seems like you only have a certain # of times to do it before they deem your license stolen or given away, and then they say it's your fault or some BS.
There is some timelimit involved here - if you make too many hardware changes let's say inside 6 months then you'll have to reactivate. If you know you are going to do this then it may be a good idea to start off with a clock a year or so set back and only bring it up to date when you get towards downloading the MSN pacthes. In that way you have a"pristine" backup that you can apply the max number of HW changes to. Holmes
Excellent tip on aging, or time between hardware changes. I had heard reference to that concept from other folks. Thanks for the tip!
I keep two hard drives in my pc. One that has windows installed on it that I don't generally make a lot of changes to and the second drive which I use for linux and Solaris which I'm regularly testing different distro's on. I just power down move the ide cable over and power back up. That way I don't have to jack with restoring windows images back to the drive and having to wonder when MS is going to kick out the activation key. My next pc case will have swappable(is that a word? lol) where I can just pop out a drive and pop one back in so I don't have to mess with changing the cable. fwiw Good luck and good trading. Bsulli
Most motherboards now have BIOS that allows you to pick the boot-up drive (drive-1, drive-2, drive-3, drive-4, etc). No need to physically swap cables or drives. I have two hard-drives that I can boot from. One has FreeBSD and the other has a dual-boot configuration between Windows and OSX86.