What happens to Vista if I swap the hard drive to another PC

[gerdh]

I have two close to identical X61 but one came with Vista Home and the other with Vista Ultimate.

I intend to keep the machine which came with Vista Home, but prefer to use Vista Ultimate - so, can't I just swap the hard drives?

What does that do to my Vista installation?

- the hardware is close to identical
- what happens to the activation?

comments apprecitated..

Gerd

[mgo]

I have two close to identical X61 but one came with Vista Home and the other with Vista Ultimate.

I intend to keep the machine which came with Vista Home, but prefer to use Vista Ultimate - so, can't I just swap the hard drives?

What does that do to my Vista installation?

- the hardware is close to identical
- what happens to the activation?

comments apprecitated..

Gerd

So what's going to happen to the -other- machine? Is it going to a relative or something?

Just for a test, swap out the drive and see what happens. The machine will likely re-configure some things, but will likely run ok.

Your safest thing would be to image the machine with Ultimate first, and then if the other one makes changes, you can restore the original image after the experiments to correct any unwanted changes.

I actually dropped an image from a different ThinkPad model onto a ThinkPad with a messed up setup and after XP worked for a while it ran just dandy. Both machines had similar hardware but were different in a lot of other ways, including model number, etc.

They were both OEM ThinkPads and there was no activation flag at all. Vista is fussier, and may flag for an activation even if the model is the same.

[ryengineer]

Not sure how but you missed the following thread just two topics below yours (at this very moment):

Question about OEM license, and imaging.

[gerdh]

Hi ryengineer,

thanks for mentioning that post, I read through it after posting my message.. my apologies for this sequence of events.

I just was not quite sure, and interpret the thread mentioned by you as

"A HDD with Vista on it from an IBM/Lenovo X60 machine will run fine in a second IBM/Lenovo X60 machine as the BIOS information to the OS is identical."

Or, will the Vista OS decide that the change of machine is in fact a "significant change of hardware"?

Gerd

PS: I guess I will have to give it a try. (My intention was to just swap the hard drive. the machine I want with Ultimate is for myself, the other one will keep the Vista Home OS installed HDD for use by my daughter.)

[Kyocera]

Or, will the Vista OS decide that the change of machine is in fact a "significant change of hardware"?

If these are both Lenovo OEM versions of the OS installed at the factory it should not make a difference.

[hellosailor]

I'm not sure but I think Vista follows the same "hardware changes" rules that XP does. When the OS boots it enumerates the hardware in the machine and looks for hardware IDs. It looks at the video card, CPU ID, CD/DVD drives and hard drives (all have serial numbers in them), the LAN card (by MAC address), and so on.

The hardware is broken down into two groups, major and minor, and the OS allows x-many changes in each group within any 90 day period. The numbers differ for laptops (more generous since they are often used with dock hardware) and desktops.

If "more than x-many" pieces of hardware in each list have changed within the pat 90 days, activation was triggered and you'd get a re-activation message requiring you to go online or call MS at a toll-free number, with MS's stated goal being that all calls are resolved in under 5 minutes, and from what I've heard they have done that. If you have any reasonable excuse ("I got the computers mixed up" "I was upgrading all my peripherals" "My kid brother...") they reactivate without any problem.

In the meantime...MS has been changing activation terms and procedures again, recently. If you want to be sure of the current limits and processes, call MS directly to confirm them. But in the worst case, your computer will ask you to call MS, it won't simply shut down or anything radical like that.

[gerdh]

I have swapped the Hard drives and found no problem. So far, so good.

Gerd

[erik]

yesterday i installed my X61's HDD in the ultrabay of my T61p, restarted, booted to the X61 drive, let it install a bunch of drivers, got it online, ran windows update, rebooted again, and finally checked vista's activation status.   even after all of that it remained activated.