Hi, I had a power spike which cooked my motherboard,power supply ect,even thou i had the computer connected to a surge board. The comp tech took the comp, and said the Hard drive was still ok. He fixed the computer e.g new motherboard ect ect. Now the problem, he asked for the windows xp 2005 media edition recovery cd that came with the original computer,which i had. But he said that it wants to wipe the hard drive of all my data when he ran it, because it does not recognise it as the original computer that it was installed on due to new motherboard ect ect. (the original comp came pre installed with xp media edition). Do you guys Know of some way that i can have my original hard drive installed with all of my data,system settings,applications ect As before ,without having to load all new programs,Broker platform ect . The Techs next idea is to buy a original 05 xp media edtion disc and load that instead of the recovery disc that came with the original computer, which just wants to clear the hard drive. Thanks...NT
He is right - you will need a reloading of the OS and programs. Use a brand new hard drive. Hard drives have a certain life expectancy and the old one is well into it. It would be very foolish not to. Have him install the old hard drive as a secondary to the new one so you can transfer your old data as needed. Even a new OS disk will flatten the hard drive - your "tech" should know that. If anything get a copy of XP Pro.