Ageing Asus XP netbook has died but its SATA HDD is OK -
can I and how would I, go about installing this HDD in my "workaday" Ubuntu box ideally as a dual boot so I can "nip back" to the bad old MS days if I need to?
Thanks In Advance
Jim K
If it's a netbook, it's almost certainly a 2.5" drive, maybe even a 1.8". Is your "workaday" box a desktop? If so, that'll probably have a chassis intended for 3.5" drives. Adapters are available, but - given the speed and capacity of a small drive compared to the cost of a big one, it seems to be more trying hard to use something than actually being a sensible thing to do.
You'll also find that Windows is set up for the Asus chipset. The first time you try to boot, it might work but will promptly go batshit trying to plug'n'pray the right drivers. If it works, it'll then request re- authentication with MS.
Honestly, you'd be best off putting a second 3.5" drive in the new machine, and reinstalling from scratch. Except, of course, the Asus install media may not work on a non-Asus machine, and you won't be licenced...
But, apart from all that lot...
Well this in an exercise in "suck it and see". The fundamental difficulty is that the drive will currently be configured with drivers and a hardware abstraction layer that matches your old machine and not the one you are installing the drive in. How elegantly the OS handles this varies from "quite" to "not at all".
The best case is you try booting from the drive, and windows will load using a default VGA screen driver, go through lots of detecting and installing drivers, and reboot a time or two before finally coming up close to normal. Possibly leaving you to track down and install drivers for a couple of odds and ends.
The "not at all" case, will result in the machine blue screening or simply rebooting during boot and getting nowhere fast. In this case you will need to boot from a Win XP CD and do a repair install (i.e. install over the top of the old installation) to fix it. Note that not all CDs will permit this - some will insist on a reformat and install, which is not what you want. (you need a retail XP cd rather than an OEM one ideally).
The other option obviously would be to install virtual box or similar and load a fresh version of Win XP into that.
If you mean a suitable cable, yes you'll need one. If you mean a hdd holder, utterly pointless.
its trivial. Just use the right cable.
Xp might or might not get going. But you dont [automatically] get a dual boot system that way, its not quite that simple.
Move your data to wherever its wanted, and do a fresh install on the 2nd hdd. Then you'll need to fix the dual boot so it defaults to ubuntu.
TBH its a lot easier to just use the hdd as a usb hdd, with suitable adaptor. All you need do is plug it in.
NT
Well as far as the connections are concerned it will probably work, However if the hardware inthe two computers are different enough, it won't recover enough to boot and install the new drivers for the completely different hardware. I've done it with various amd processored and via chipped motherboards, but try the same with an intel to amd you often get a complete mess.
Brian
The authorisation was not a problem for me. I just ran the genuine advantage thingy.
Brian
+1
Thanks everyone.
'Oh c*ck' seems apt at the moment.
Only thing I think I want windoze for is to maintain a few old IP cameras whose setups only ever worked in IE with their assorted downloaded runtimes (java, activex I think)..
Any other non windoze ways of doing this?
More thanks in advance
Jim K
Try one of these this is au ebay but you would have same thing
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