Author Topic: Cloning WinXP onto new hardware - workable?  (Read 6636 times)

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Offline soldar

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Re: Cloning WinXP onto new hardware - workable?
« Reply #25 on: January 17, 2019, 03:56:04 pm »
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.
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Offline james_s

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Re: Cloning WinXP onto new hardware - workable?
« Reply #26 on: January 17, 2019, 06:04:21 pm »
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.
 

Offline free_electron

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Re: Cloning WinXP onto new hardware - workable?
« Reply #27 on: January 17, 2019, 07:28:29 pm »
You write 'critical monitoring'. And you want to kludge something together ?  :palm:

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.
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Offline soldar

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Re: Cloning WinXP onto new hardware - workable?
« Reply #28 on: January 17, 2019, 07:34:36 pm »
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. ;)
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Offline DeltaTopic starter

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Re: Cloning WinXP onto new hardware - workable?
« Reply #29 on: January 17, 2019, 08:12:22 pm »
You write 'critical monitoring'. And you want to kludge something together ?  :palm:

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.
 

Offline free_electron

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Re: Cloning WinXP onto new hardware - workable?
« Reply #30 on: January 17, 2019, 08:52:33 pm »
You write 'critical monitoring'. And you want to kludge something together ?  :palm:

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...
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Offline soldar

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Re: Cloning WinXP onto new hardware - workable?
« Reply #31 on: January 17, 2019, 09:07:44 pm »
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. 
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Offline Halcyon

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Re: Cloning WinXP onto new hardware - workable?
« Reply #32 on: January 17, 2019, 09:17:23 pm »
You write 'critical monitoring'. And you want to kludge something together ?  :palm:

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.
 

Offline james_s

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Re: Cloning WinXP onto new hardware - workable?
« Reply #33 on: January 17, 2019, 11:15:44 pm »
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.
 

Offline digsys

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Re: Cloning WinXP onto new hardware - workable?
« Reply #34 on: January 18, 2019, 12:51:43 am »
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.
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Offline OwO

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Re: Cloning WinXP onto new hardware - workable?
« Reply #35 on: January 18, 2019, 02:02:33 am »
 :palm: :palm: :palm: :palm: :palm: :palm: :palm: :palm:

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.
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Offline TERRA Operative

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Re: Cloning WinXP onto new hardware - workable?
« Reply #36 on: January 18, 2019, 03:33:28 am »
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.
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Offline james_s

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Re: Cloning WinXP onto new hardware - workable?
« Reply #37 on: January 18, 2019, 04:33:54 am »
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.
 

Offline digsys

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Re: Cloning WinXP onto new hardware - workable?
« Reply #38 on: January 18, 2019, 01:10:18 pm »
Quote from: james_s
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.
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Offline james_s

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Re: Cloning WinXP onto new hardware - workable?
« Reply #39 on: January 18, 2019, 06:41:00 pm »
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.
 

Offline soldar

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Re: Cloning WinXP onto new hardware - workable?
« Reply #40 on: January 18, 2019, 07:06:56 pm »
:palm: :palm: :palm: :palm: :palm: :palm: :palm: :palm:

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!
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Offline LapTop006

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Re: Cloning WinXP onto new hardware - workable?
« Reply #41 on: January 19, 2019, 04:21:20 am »
:palm: :palm: :palm: :palm: :palm: :palm: :palm: :palm:

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).
 

Offline CJay

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Re: Cloning WinXP onto new hardware - workable?
« Reply #42 on: January 21, 2019, 10:48:45 am »
:palm: :palm: :palm: :palm: :palm: :palm: :palm: :palm:

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?

 

Offline james_s

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Re: Cloning WinXP onto new hardware - workable?
« Reply #43 on: January 21, 2019, 05:48:46 pm »
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.
 
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Offline soldar

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Re: Cloning WinXP onto new hardware - workable?
« Reply #44 on: January 21, 2019, 08:49:50 pm »
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.
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Offline james_s

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Re: Cloning WinXP onto new hardware - workable?
« Reply #45 on: January 22, 2019, 12:23:55 am »
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.
 

Offline edy

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Re: Cloning WinXP onto new hardware - workable?
« Reply #46 on: January 22, 2019, 12:33:49 am »
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.
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Offline rrinker

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Re: Cloning WinXP onto new hardware - workable?
« Reply #47 on: January 22, 2019, 08:00:16 pm »
 I would definitely virtualize something like this, then you can keep copies of the virtual machine file that can be quickly spun up on other hardware if the original hardware fails. Then the underlying hardware doesn't really matter, so long as it has enough resources to run the VM, it can fire up this system and get back in business.
 We've done this many times, not for the purpose of retaining an old system, but for the purpose of keeping it going long enough to transfer the data to more modern systems.

 As for swapping drives - with XP that's not likely to work very well. I've done it many times with newer versions of Windows. At one point I went through 3 laptops in a month - not failures but a newer and better model became available. I just swapped the hard drive, I believe it was Windows 7 at the time. It booted, did a whole bunch of driver updates and rebooted. Sometimes there was a missing driver, but nothing critical to the basic boot and login, so it was just a matter of hitting the manufacturer web site and downloading the missing driver. That was swapping between different models, with different CPUs, screen resolutions, etc. but all from the same manufacturer. Even if you DO get that far with XP - most newer hardware does not even have XP drivers available from the vendor.

 

Offline Electro Detective

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Re: Cloning WinXP onto new hardware - workable?
« Reply #48 on: January 25, 2019, 10:32:53 am »
Thumbs up here for running XP (and 2000!) on DELL gear  :-+ :-+  NEVER had a problem > PAY ONCE, CRY ONCE OEM PCs

just make sure you have the genuine Dell XP Recovery CD to bail you out in case of drama,
with no Activation BS or desperate online piracy suggestions to think about on a legit Dell box/laptop if/when shtf
and you have to nuke a p0rn infected partition, format and reinstall


FWIW: Dell Vista SP2 and Win 7 OEM upgrade rigs aren't too shabby either  :clap: :clap:

------------------

 @ Dell: please PM me for my banking details,
even though I spoke the truth, no urban battler plugs stuff for free in 2019,
and corporate praise doesn't put food on the table, or buy new OEM PCs.

Thanks in advance, Happy New Year, and don't be cheap about it darlings  :-*
« Last Edit: January 25, 2019, 10:40:25 am by Electro Detective »
 

Offline Psi

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Re: Cloning WinXP onto new hardware - workable?
« Reply #49 on: January 25, 2019, 10:40:41 am »
I used to do the trick where you install a service pack and then change the drive at the point where it says it has to reboot to finish the install. The reason being that the service pack update forces a hardware re-detect at this point in the process, so you can get it to boot when it would have otherwise BSOD.
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