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Old November 18th, 2020, 12:50 AM
justacruzr2 justacruzr2 is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2014
Posts: 45
Cool File transfer help requested

I'm setting up another computer, an HP Media Center circa 2005, with XP Pro Retail version. In order to save myself weeks of installing apps and doing personal settings for everything I wanted to transfer the folders \Program Files, \Documents and Settings and \Windows to the hard drive on the HP. Using my regular computer, an eMachines, I copied those folders to a spare HDD I have which is a PATA. The HP has a SATA HDD but the 2 CD/DVD drives are PATA. So I removed 1 of the CD/DVD drives and hooked up the PATA HDD from the eMachines in its place. I then started up the HP and went into setup to change the boot order to boot to the HDD that I transferred over from the eMachines. When I rebooted I got a blue screen message that went by so fast I couldn't read it but I'm assuming that Windows didn't like the fact that it was from a different computer even though this is the RETAIL version of XP which doesn't do the machine checking that the OEM version of Windows does. I think that when Windows began to load it checked the HKLM\Machine and HKLM\System entries in the registry and found that they did not match the characteristics of the HP but I thought that it would just go into the "Found New Hardware" routine and correct that. It didn't. So I have 2 ideas I'd like to try to see if I can get around that.

1) Export the registry entries HKLM\Machine and HKLM\System from the HP XP and then Import them into the eMachines XP registry before shutdown and then move the eMachines HDD over to the HP. Then the eMachines HDD registry should contain the correct info for the HP computer.

or

2) Boot into DOS on the HP from CD and then copy the registry files of the HP to a folder on the eMachines HDD and then copy the folders \Program Files, \Documents and Settings and \Windows over from the eMachines HDD to the HP SATA drive and then copy the registry files back to the HP HDD.

The only question I have about idea 2 is can DOS copy files from a PATA HDD to a SATA HDD? The SATA HDD is set to IDE mode on the HP in the BIOS setup.

Would appreciate your thoughts on this. Thanks.
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