Moving XP to another computer

I have an Emachines computer that came preloaded with XP. I am going to spend an extended period of time in France and want to take my hard drive with me and plug it into a computer that I have there. The idea is that I would just plug in the hard drive and off I would go just like at home.

The problem is that the system will not boot on any other computer than the one on which it was originally installed. Is there any way around this?

Thanks for your time

 

Hello Wilchris,

Quite aside from any technical problem, what you propose is not legal, XP can't be migrated to another system.

I have an Emachines computer that came preloaded with XP.
Which is why never ran into the issue. The OEM registered and activated your copy of XP and is system specific. If you succeded in running that HD on another machine, it would get flagged as belonging to another system when you tried to activate it.

It would be feasable to use the orginal boot drive as secondary non-booting drive, provided the new host system has the capability. Or get a external HD cage and connect via USB, again, if the new system has the capability. See below.

http://aumha.org/win5/a/wpa.php

What you should do instead is to copy your userdata on removable media, or get a internal or external HD and use that as the place for userdata. Quite easy now to either buy a USB connected external drive or buy an internal drive with a external drive cage and use it for that purpose.

Regards - Charles