Swapping computer hard drive advice

[FarmerPug]

I bought a Panasonic Toughbook from the bay of e a few weeks ago so that it can do the pp2000 duties. Its a good laptop and it definatley deserves its name, its extremely solid, if it was dropped on the floor the floor would sustain more damage than the laptop. It also has a suitably sized screen for pp2000 and the battery holds its charge for well over 5 hours.

One issue is that it comes with an 80Gb hard drive which if i wanted to do a dual boot with XP and 7 isn't really enough, the hard drive inside the tough book is held in a spongy shock proof, heated enclosure, but the hard drive itself looks like a fairly ordinary hard drive:

these are the pins on the end of it:


I have two spare hard drives at home, one is a 160Gb taken from the old netbook, the other is a 320Gb taken from my macbook, both have this sort of connector on the end:


There seems to be adapters available that allow it to accept a Sata hard drive into the original enclosure, but also devices that hold a hard drive where the DVD drive goes:
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/2nd-SATA-Hard ... 1168575137
Can a computer use 2 hard drives with a different operating system on each?

[gumby6371]

IDE to sata convertors are available but I'd suggest getting one big IDE drive and running VM ware for XP.
VM ware is free for home use and pretty straightforward to use.
It also means you can have t'internet on 7 and not on XP to avoid accidental updating of planet.
As a main machine 80GB is too small but for a browsing/planet machine it should be fine. You should have around 45GB after both installs. Allocate about 10 to XP with VM ware.

[FarmerPug]

At the moment 80Gb would be fine just for pp2000, although my cousin has a renault clip device, which would be good to run off this laptop. I don't really want to spend any money on another hard drive when i have these pair sitting gathering dust, 320Gb would be nice.

One thing i was wondering is how does transferring everything to another hard drive affect windows xp, the version the laptop currently has is genuine and thus not showing up reminders about activating windows, does that get disturbed by changing the hard drive.

[gumby6371]

If you have a genuine key you should be ok as I don't think XP needs online activation, if you do have any problems then use the telephone activation option which will pop up and guide you through the process. It's very straight forward.
Personally I wouldn't bother installing any WI-FI drivers if it's just for planet, I'm not 100% sure which service pack PP2000 needs tho.

[nutski]

XP will use online activation but it shouldn't be a problem just swapping the hard drive as that won't be enough to trigger issues.
I can't remember if there is a service pack requirement for PP but it makes sense to put everything in and upto date anyway

[Rolebama]

Microsoft have stopped supporting XP, so don't much about with the original hard drive until you know any replacement can be sorted. XP shouldn't need activation now it has been declared obsolete.

[nutski]

Microsoft have stopped supporting and issuing security updates, you still need to go through activation though!

[V6Exec]

When I have had to move Windows from one drive to another I have used http://clonezilla.org/

Quite simple to use and manages to shift everything. My current PP2000 laptop has a clonezilla backup just in case something dies so that I can reinstall a working system very quickly.