Cloning WinXP onto new hardware - workable?

[duak]

Don't hold me to this for every case but I understand that Microsoft had a deal with Dell to provide XP for turnkey systems as part of the price.   It may be that if you are installing XP on a Dell computer, you don't need an activation code.   I've got a few older Dells (pre I3, I5, I7 series processors) that I've installed XP on either from a Dell OEM CDROM or a generic CDROM.  The install never asked for a code from the COA for activation.  I don't know if it activated later when it got on the 'net.

Other manufacturers (hp, Gateway, eMachines etc.) may have worked out a deal with Microsoft for an OS license but I have no experience with them at all.

For what it's worth,

Cheers,

[digsys]

... if you are installing XP on a Dell computer, you don't need an activation code  ....  installed XP on either from a Dell OEM CDROM or a generic CDROM.  The install never asked for a code from the COA for activation .... Other manufacturers (hp, Gateway, eMachines etc.) may have worked out a deal with Microsoft for an OS license ...

That's what I find with just about every laptop, and just about every name brand (of that era). I still load fresh XP3 on laptops without needing to activate.

[Halcyon]

In my experience just transferring a hard disk over to another machine (even if you delete all the drivers in device manager beforehand) usually doesn't end well.

If you have a different HAL, Windows will just blue screen and refuse to boot. The HAL is installed during the initial part of the Windows setup process and there is no easy way to replace or change it on older Windows versions. Never versions of Windows will decide on the appropriate HAL on boot.

You could try virtualising it in something like ESXi. That is what I would do. Get yourself a decent server, install a bare-metal hypervisor on it and run your legacy software in a VM. PCI express RS232 adapters are fairly common and easy to find. With ESXi, you can pass-through the physical card to your guest OS, so it communicates directly with the hardware. I do this with disk controllers and network cards all the time.

[soldar]

Don't hold me to this for every case but I understand that Microsoft had a deal with Dell to provide XP for turnkey systems as part of the price.   It may be that if you are installing XP on a Dell computer, you don't need an activation code.   I've got a few older Dells (pre I3, I5, I7 series processors) that I've installed XP on either from a Dell OEM CDROM or a generic CDROM.  The install never asked for a code from the COA for activation.  I don't know if it activated later when it got on the 'net.

Other manufacturers (hp, Gateway, eMachines etc.) may have worked out a deal with Microsoft for an OS license but I have no experience with them at all.

That is called a "volume license" and only works with the installation disk with the correct PID and the correct hardware (Dell or whatever). I have a whole collection of win xp disks with the different license types.

[james_s]

The problem you are likely to have with new hardware is drivers, for example on my desktop I tried installing XP and Vista on separate hard drives I plug in and neither OS supported the onboard graphics.

You should be able to easily find a good used machine to have as a spare. Pick up a couple of them if you have room, it'll be fine.

[free_electron]

You write 'critical monitoring'. And you want to kludge something together ? 

First rule of engineering : if it works , leave it alone.

And if you really want to 'clone' this thing : go on ebay and buy the same machine.
This is a Dell machine , so it means that this comes preloaded with a dell windows image. Those are transportable between (identical) machines. Windows looks for a marker stored in the bios to detect if it is allowed to run.

Clone the harddisk and the bios chip and off you go. In many Dell machines this is a simple Flash eprom in a socket.

[soldar]

First rule of engineering : if it works , leave it alone.

Now you tell me! All my life I thought the rule was: if it works, mess with it until you find out why it stopped working when you started messing with it.

[Delta]

You write 'critical monitoring'. And you want to kludge something together ? 

First rule of engineering : if it works , leave it alone.

I'm not sure if you're being factitious, but I am not trying to kludge anything together, nor am I planning to mess around with anything that's working fine.
I am trying to assemble a working spare, ready to be used when called upon. That is good engineering practice, is it not?

Yes, it is working, but if it dies it will very suddenly be my fault.

I am just a lowly electronics technician, on a drilling rig in the middle of the sea, working for a company with an incredibly slow moving buerocratic stores/management/logistics/purchasing circus.  I can't just get stuff on next day delivery from the online retailer of my choice, nor nip to the local computer shop.

Ah maybe you're right, fuck 'em, who do I think I am anyway?! I clearly don't know what I'm doing. Thanks for keeping me right, Sir.  At least a drew a cock on a 690v busbar today.

[free_electron]

You write 'critical monitoring'. And you want to kludge something together ? 

First rule of engineering : if it works , leave it alone.

I'm not sure if you're being factitious, but I am not trying to kludge anything together, nor am I planning to mess around with anything that's working fine.
I am trying to assemble a working spare, ready to be used when called upon. That is good engineering practice, is it not?

Yes, it is working, but if it dies it will very suddenly be my fault.

I am just a lowly electronics technician, on a drilling rig in the middle of the sea, working for a company with an incredibly slow moving buerocratic stores/management/logistics/purchasing circus.  I can't just get stuff on next day delivery from the online retailer of my choice, nor nip to the local computer shop.

Ah maybe you're right, fuck 'em, who do I think I am anyway?! I clearly don't know what I'm doing. Thanks for keeping me right, Sir.  At least a drew a cock on a 690v busbar today.

OIL rig ? please don't make another deepwater horizon .....

Like i said : if you want to make a spare : get an IDENTICAL machine off ebay ( or two or three ) , clone the drives and the bios eeprom and done.
Then you will have a backup.

But even then... For an oil rig ? if they can't spend 50K on a machine then we are all doomed...

[soldar]

Delta, calm down.  Maybe you need some shore leave and R&R.

I think the consensus is that the best thing to do is to have spares for all the parts of the machine which basically means having a spare machine. It is simple and inexpensive. Anything else will be more complicated, more espensive and less reliable as a solution. 

[Halcyon]

You write 'critical monitoring'. And you want to kludge something together ? 

First rule of engineering : if it works , leave it alone.

I'm not sure if you're being factitious, but I am not trying to kludge anything together, nor am I planning to mess around with anything that's working fine.
I am trying to assemble a working spare, ready to be used when called upon. That is good engineering practice, is it not?

Yes, it is working, but if it dies it will very suddenly be my fault.

It is good practice. Redundancy is very important, even in non-critical systems.

Also, it's not a case of IF it dies, but how long until it actually does die.

[james_s]

That is a modern enough machine that there will still be a bunch of them around, but old enough that a truly modern one is likely to require significant effort to make it work. The path of least resistance is to find one or more identical or at least very similar machines to have as spares. If you have a whole machine, you have at least one of every spare part you could possibly need, and you can save time by just swapping the whole machine, then troubleshoot later at your leisure.

[digsys]

I'll add one more note before this thread ends - to answer comments on "newer machines won't have drivers for blah blah blah"
On several occasions over the years, I've come across that situation installing XP3 on newer hardware - All I had to do is find drivers for "older" versions of
that core processor / controller, and see if XP was happy with it. It would ALWAYS install the base functions (never had to try more than 2 versions).
The functions that didn't get installed weren't of much use anyway. NEVER had a failed attempt. I may have tweaked a registry item once or twice, but only
cause I wanted to see how far I could go.

[OwO]

 

Windows XP in 2019. Running critical infrastructure where down time would cost > $200k.
Let that sink in.

If I were you I would be scrambling to find a replacement or develop my own. I would think even some shitty in-house software running on an Orange Pi would be better than this piece of shit.

[TERRA Operative]

What ever you end up doing (I would virtualise XP on a server with a redundant disk array to allow hotswapping), be sure to use good hardware (no cheap PSU's!) and NAS rated disks at least, enterprise disks at best.

Virtualising XP on a server means you aren't limited by harware obsolescence anymore, and most server motherboards come with a real serial port for console access too so you are covered there. But you can always just plug in a pci serial card whichever way you go I guess.

[james_s]

I'll add one more note before this thread ends - to answer comments on "newer machines won't have drivers for blah blah blah"
On several occasions over the years, I've come across that situation installing XP3 on newer hardware - All I had to do is find drivers for "older" versions of
that core processor / controller, and see if XP was happy with it. It would ALWAYS install the base functions (never had to try more than 2 versions).
The functions that didn't get installed weren't of much use anyway. NEVER had a failed attempt. I may have tweaked a registry item once or twice, but only
cause I wanted to see how far I could go.

If you can find a driver for the onboard graphics that will let me run XP on my core i7 desktop I'm all ears. Maybe it was Vista and XP had some other issue but I spent a solid day trying to get either OS running properly on it since MS Flight Sim crashes frequently on Win7 x64. I eventually gave up, after running into multiple apparent show stoppers.

[digsys]

If you can find a driver for the onboard graphics that will let me run XP on my core i7 desktop I'm all ears. Maybe it was Vista and XP had some other issue but I spent a solid day trying to get either OS running properly on it since MS Flight Sim crashes frequently on Win7 x64. I eventually gave up, after running into multiple apparent show stoppers.

There's been way too many hardware / bios changes the last few years, so anything i5 + would not be easy. Not saying it is impossible, but it'd need a lot of
googling :-). I never pushed the limit. Was just pointing out that you can usually get away with using "foreign" drivers. May be of help to someone.

[james_s]

I think if I used a separate video card I could have gotten Vista working but I didn't want to get a card just for that one use case.

[soldar]

Windows XP in 2019. Running critical infrastructure where down time would cost > $200k.
Let that sink in.

If I were you I would be scrambling to find a replacement or develop my own. I would think even some shitty in-house software running on an Orange Pi would be better than this piece of shit.

I do not understand nor share this attitude.  If it works reliably why spend time, money and effort on something which might work worse and create new problems. Not to mention that the OP is not the person who has the authority to decide this.

This type of response is just not helpful. You are pounding nails with a hammer just like the Romans did? You should get a Quarter Pounder 2500 which works with retrospective energy and can drive 25000 nails an hour into bituminous concrete!

[LapTop006]

Windows XP in 2019. Running critical infrastructure where down time would cost > $200k.
Let that sink in.

If I were you I would be scrambling to find a replacement or develop my own. I would think even some shitty in-house software running on an Orange Pi would be better than this piece of shit.

I do not understand nor share this attitude.  If it works reliably why spend time, money and effort on something which might work worse and create new problems. Not to mention that the OP is not the person who has the authority to decide this.

If it has zero connection to any network? Perhaps, although I'd certainly want to see a sensible sparing strategy long before now.

If it's got *any* connection to a network? No. Just no. The level of work you'd need to do to make that acceptable is enough that it might be *easier* to get things running on Win10 (or at least Win7, but that goes out of support in a year).

[CJay]

Windows XP in 2019. Running critical infrastructure where down time would cost > $200k.
Let that sink in.

If I were you I would be scrambling to find a replacement or develop my own. I would think even some shitty in-house software running on an Orange Pi would be better than this piece of shit.

It worked when it was new, it was specced as that when new, how is it suddenly unsuitable?

[james_s]

I just haven't seen issues with running old operating systems, despite the hysteria it invokes. I have an XP laptop I still use for specific purposes, it connects to my WiFi when I boot it up but I don't actually surf the web from it. I've never had it get infected, and I'm not really sure how someone would manage to attack it. It's behind a NAT router/firewall, not an impervious barrier by any means but combine that with the fact that nobody outside knows it's there and it's a very low value target. Exploits are a big problem with outside facing systems, servers of all types, but for a domestic PC that's behind a router and not serving anything? I've cleaned up a LOT of infected PCs but not a single one of those was due to an unpatched exploit, they have ALL gotten infected by the user getting tricked into installing something or surfing sketchy sites using an outdated browser. The user is always the most easily exploitable element and one that is impossible to patch. To reiterate, I'm talking about personal computers, not outward facing servers.

This attitude of "OMG it's so ancient and has to be upgraded in the name of safety!!" thing is relatively new and I suspect largely perpetrated by those who stand to gain from providing software upgrades and support.

[soldar]

I just haven't seen issues with running old operating systems, despite the hysteria it invokes. I have an XP laptop I still use for specific purposes, it connects to my WiFi when I boot it up but I don't actually surf the web from it. I've never had it get infected, and I'm not really sure how someone would manage to attack it. It's behind a NAT router/firewall, not an impervious barrier by any means but combine that with the fact that nobody outside knows it's there and it's a very low value target. Exploits are a big problem with outside facing systems, servers of all types, but for a domestic PC that's behind a router and not serving anything? I've cleaned up a LOT of infected PCs but not a single one of those was due to an unpatched exploit, they have ALL gotten infected by the user getting tricked into installing something or surfing sketchy sites using an outdated browser. The user is always the most easily exploitable element and one that is impossible to patch. To reiterate, I'm talking about personal computers, not outward facing servers.

This attitude of "OMG it's so ancient and has to be upgraded in the name of safety!!" thing is relatively new and I suspect largely perpetrated by those who stand to gain from providing software upgrades and support.

I totally agree with this. I am still running Win XP PRO SP3 on about nine computers. I have *never* used AV software which I consider to be worse than a virus. And I have never been infected with anything. Never. I am extremely careful with what I install and I have a brain. That's it. The best antivirus is free and is between your ears.

If it works why would you care that it's old? On the contrary, it shows it has withstood the test of time. I used to work for an aerospace manufacturer and some of the devices and components used were ancient. People used to ask me why they would use ancient components when there were newer, better ones available. Well, the old ones are reliable and have proven themselves. The newer ones not so much.

[james_s]

One of the few reasons I have replaced older reliable hardware with newer stuff is power consumption. I used to run a home server on an old Dell Optiplex that pulled about 200W. Later I replaced this with a Sun Sparcstation that was around 60W as I recall. Then several years ago I replaced it with a Raspberry Pi that draws about 2.5W. All of these systems performed similarly and I wouldn't be shocked if the old Dell would have kept going all this time, but my electricity isn't free and something running 24/7 the kWhs add up.

[edy]

Is it possible for you to just run it in a Virtual environment? Rip the harddrive into a virtual disk, or set up a new WinXPMode installation and run it under VirtualBox? I've had success cloning WinXPMode and running it in VirtualBox with no issues at all. You need a license to initially register WinXPMode, but once you have it made, you can fairly easily copy and paste the virtual machine on any number of other machines and run it under VirtualBox.