As I know there are a fair few IT bods on here…
I have a PC here at work that has gone a little tits up, I’ve not used it in a while and when i cam to turn it on it said it had lost its time and date… OK so could be a battery fault so put in the new date and time, restart the PC and BSOD!!!. It suggested that it was an issue with the hard drive so i popped it out and tried it in another PC and it seems fine (except its tied to the first PC licence file) try another hard drive in the first PC and still BSOD (this hard drive is also known to be good. My guess is that the mother board is fried as the loss of time and date suggest something bad has happened. The problem is that the hard drive is tied to the mother board and i really need to transfer the license to a new board. Does anyone know if microsoft will allow this?? or how it can be done? Its XP by the way. cheers

Have you tried replacing the CMOS battery?

XP doesn’t link to the motherboard.

Don’t use software that need authorizing?

XP doesn’t link to the motherboard.

Google suggests that OEM versions of XP were linked (although perhaps to a collection of components rather than just motherboard).

Does anyone know if microsoft will allow this?? or how it can be done? Its XP by the way.

I suspect MS no longer care about WinXP licenses, so if you give them a phone they may be able to help you out.

Does anyone know if microsoft will allow this??

I have swapped hard drives in PCs before (I think in XP, maybe on Win7 too) and have just gone through the registration wizard – seems to have been fine.

Haven’t done it for a while though…

Yep tried that, if i remove all the hardware excluding the hard drive it just craps out, yet if i plug the same hard drive into another PC it boots up but then asks for the licence to be activated. I’d assumed that the mother board would have the licence stored within the BIOS somewhere which would stop you from moving the hard drive from the PC, don’t know if that’s the case but I cant think of anything else!

You might well be right I’m not sure how this has been configured as it was supplied with the machine, it seems odd that its asking this but i’ll persevere!.

I know XP is no longer supported so i’m hoping that they will allow it to be re-activated, it is OEM by the way.

use one of these OEM license keys?

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb457078.aspx

Right.

Loss of time / date would imply a battery failure. This is usually (but not always) a CR2032 “button battery,” dead easy to replace if so. It’s not generally indicative of catastrophic failure.

Swapping XP hard drives between PCs might work. It also might explode in spectacular fashion. A ‘known good’ HDD blue-screening when transplanted into another tells you nothing.

The hard drive isn’t “tied to the motherboard,” however for an OEM install you’ll need branded media to reinstall using the serial number on the sticker on the case. There are ways around this.

But to be honest, I wouldn’t bother. Windows XP is a fifteen year old OS which went out of support years ago and in 2017 I’d spend less time working on an XP system than I have on typing this reply. You can pick up a Windows 7 licence now for about £15.

Try swapping the memory with a known working PC.

That’s not a bad shout at all actually. Or running one or the other DIMM if you’ve got two or more.

Better yet,

http://www.memtest86.com/

(or http://www.memtest.org/ is sometimes more reliable on older systems.)

I agree. CMOS battery swap should do it

I’ve changed the battery to no effect…. As for using XP, unfortunately it has to be this as it drives a simatic s7 plc which needs to be run in XP. The PC was actually supplied as win7 and had to be changed back. It’s a 15 yr old machine with all the electronics from that era(s7 was discontinued years ago) we have kit here using warp because the manufacturer considers it stable for the software they wrote!!! Btw the software we run on it is wonderware along with the s7… Total pita to be honest but there you go…

Get a new PC and run XP in VMware?

advice here on recovering the licence key:

Click

I’m with Cougar’s first post.

It’s an insecure outdated OS on knackered hardware, unless it’s got some vital bit of data on it (if so why?) or runs a bit of software that costs a zillion quid to buy an update version on, scrap it and move on.

From personal experience of trying to help out BIL software licences are often tied to hardware. Even if XP will work and £15 buys you a new licence other software might not. In BIL’s case the failure of the PC/drive meant he had a replacement cost of £1,500 for medical hardware/software he could no longer use. Following this experience have recommended another BIL clone his harddrive before he experiences a similar problem (he is at least on W10)

The PC was actually supplied as win7 and had to be changed back

So it’s not an OEM install? Or was it from the time when you got both and could choose?

OEM nonsense aside, do you still have an XP licence key?

If I had hardware reliant on XP I’d be seriously considering upgrading that also. It’s a ticking time bomb.

OS2/Warp, srsly? I’m guessing either financial sector or public sector. Either way I’d move jobs. Life’s too short for that sort of nonsense.

Actually you need to rebore the DDF62 file, then reconfigure the OS partition. Then unplug at the socket and stick a metal screw driver straight into the wall socket.. should solve all the issues.

Just an update as i have not fixed it quite yet in respsonse to cougar, this install was only 3 years ago and was changed as we needed to change the way the machine operated , the PC (dell) was installed and new control software for the S7 was installed at a cost of £12000, so you can imagine the cost of updating to siemens latest PLC offering would be, and you would surprised at the number of relatively new machines that run old OS systems (the one running warp is 7 years old). its a private company by the way (mine actually so leaving isn’t really an option…) 😆