[Scenic] N300 Changing everything except harddrive + win XP

[rknight73]

I own a Scenic N300 (i845GE) with Win XP Pro, 756MB of RAM (I added 512MB), 40GB HDD, Ti4200 graphics card (added by me) and a 2GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor. The copy of Windows XP is a legal copy that came with the machine.

I also own an Athlon 2000XP system on an Asus A7V8X motherboard with a 6600GT graphics card and 1GB of RAM.

I have turned the Scenic N300 into a Mythtv box on Ubuntu Linux with a 250GB HDD installed in place of the original N300 40GB HDD. I want this machine to be a dedicated Mythtv (like a Tivo for those who don't know) box with no other function. This all works fine.

I also want to use the N300 40GB HDD that contains windows XP Pro in my Athlon 2000XP machine. Here's where the problem lies! The moment I try and boot the Athlon machine from the N300 HDD I get a DOS screen coming up telling me that Windows didn't start properly - this could be due to a motherboard or software change. I then get the option to boot into XP as normal, try booting last known good config, boot into safe mode, boot into safe mode with networking or boot into safe mode with command prompt.

When I try and boot Windows normally or using last known good config the machine immediately reboots. If I try any of the safe boot options the machine gets so far loading the .sys files and then reboots.

I am assuming that this is some sort of protection in Windows XP/Scenic N300. I know that OEM Windows XP does fail if you change too many components in the system but I was expecting a pretty graphics screen telling me to reactivate the system by phoning Microsoft not a DOS screen that promptly dumps me out!

What I want is a gaming/business machine on XP with the Athlon and 6600GT and the mythtv box on Ubuntu with the Ti4200 and P4 2GHZ .

I realise that I could put the N300 box back together and upgrade it with the 6600GT and 1GB of ram and run windows XP from that (there are no problems using the 40GB HDD back in the N300 - for obvious reasons). However the N300 only has AGP 4X and is less upgradeable than my Athlon XP 2000 box. Also the N300 runs very quietly which is ideal for a mythtv box whereas my Athlon system is a bit of an elephant!!!!! I will go with this config if I have to though.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to make the hard drive work (with XP Pro installed of course!) in another system? I don't see why I should purchase another copy of XP just because a few components have changed

Thanks for reading this looooong post,

Rich.

[olshevch]

Different CPU (or MB) means different computer. OEM Windows license is dedicated to only one computer, which it was sold with.

So, you have two options:
1) Buy a full single license for Windows XP and install it on any computer you want.
2) Buy another computer for your dedicated Mithtv and use XP on Scenic.

PS BTW, you put too much hopes on Windows that it could work at least as stable as it did if you stick a hard into a different computer.

[rknight73]

That's pretty much what I figured. I still don't understand how Microsoft can get away with this policy. Surely if I want to change components in my system that is my business. There's a reason I use Linux more and more.

If anyone knows of a way around this then please let me know.

Thanks,

Rich.