freddy

Andrew,

What you say is all very true, and something Nate would soon learn
regardless of what anyone had to say about his situation. A big problem on
forums like this is that people don't disclose all the information needed
about their particular situation so that others can provide a comprehensive
response. Thus, Nate got responses all over the board.
--
freddy


"Andrew McNab" wrote:

> Depends on if you bought a retail, upgrade or OEM version of the OS. With
> retail and upgrade versions, MS will require a decent reason to hand out a
> new key. With OEM, I have been told by phone representatives that the license
> dies with the machine. OEM versions generally ship with machines built by
> companies like Dell, Compaq etc and the "System Restore" disks have the OEM
> OS in there and will only install on a machine with specific hardware. If you
> built your own machine and purchased an OEM disk at the time you purchased
> all the hardware, you scored a "cheap" copy but at the cost of no support and
> a small chance of getting a key for another system. Typically a motherboard
> failure can warrant the issue of a new key given that it occured in a
> reasonable amount of time after the key was first used in an Activation.
>
> "freddy" wrote:
>
> > Nate,
> >
> > You have to do a fresh install. You'll never be able to boot your new
> > system using your previous hard drive contents. Toooooo much new hardware,
> > and Vista will be looking for the OLD hardware, but won't be able to find it.
> >
> > Start fresh and call Microsoft for a new activation key. Microsoft is
> > usually very accommodating in these matters, so long as you have a legitimate
> > copy of Vista and it doesn't remain installed on the old system.
> > --
> > freddy
> >
> >
> > "Nate" wrote:
> >
> > > All,
> > >
> > > I just installed Vista Ultimate about two weeks ago. I am debating on
> > > purchasing/installing a new CPU, RAM, Motherboard, and primary Harddrive. My
> > > question is: Is is going to be possible to clone my primary drive onto my new
> > > primary drive, install the new Mobo, CPU, RAM without major issues? Keep in
> > > mind I do have BitLocker enabled on my primary drive. Just curious to see if
> > > anyone has had success doing this yet with Vista Ultimate and BitLocker, or
> > > would it be better to start from scratch (fresh install). My concern comes
> > > from it being a new operating system from Microsoft, and re-activating the OS
> > > within a short ammount of time (about two to three weeks when I finally get
> > > all the parts together). I don't want to activate the piracy flag ;-)