Will I need to reactivate MS Windows if I upgrade the harddrive on my laptop?

Question

I have a Toshiba Tecra A9 laptop that I want to upgrade the 120GB drive (HTS722012K9SA00) to a 500GB drive (HD20500 IDK/7K). Will I need to go through activation again due to hardware changes?

Answer 1

According to this 6 or more changes of the following hardware items are needed before your prompted for re-activation:

1. Display Adapter
2. SCSI Adapter
3. IDE Adapter
4. Network Adapter MAC Address
5. RAM Amount Range (i.e. 0-64mb, 64-128mb, etc)
6. Processor Type
7. Processor Serial Number
8. Hard Drive Device
9. Hard Drive Volume Serial Number
10. CD—ROM / CD-RW / DVD-ROM

If the PC is not dockable and a network adapter exists and is not changed, 6 or more of the other above values would have to change before reactivation was required. If a network adapter existed but is changed or never existed at all, 4 or more changes (including the changed network adapter if it previously existed) will result in a requirement to reactivate.

Answer 2

Assuming you're cloning the drives? No, you won't have to.

If you're not cloning, but installing to the new drive (starting over, in other words) then yep.

Answer 3

Thank you everyone. I did not need to reactivate XP. Here is the procedure that I followed to intall the new drive.

I cloned the drive with a Clonezilla Live CD.

Toshiba ships with two partitions. One for C:\ and the other for squirreling away what is is memory for XP to suspend. I spun up my Linux VM and used parted to move the second partition to the end of the disk.

With the second partition moved, I used fdisk to resize the first partition care of this website that I pulled out of Google Cache since the website was down. At this point I set partition one as a NTFS and boot partition.

# fdisk /dev/sde
Command (m for help): p

Command (m for help): d
Partition number (1-4): 1

Command (m for help): n
Command action
e extended
p primary partition (1-4)
p
Partition number (1-4): 1
First cylinder (8-3648, default 1): 1
Last cylinder or +size or +sizeM or +sizeK (8-3648, default 3648): +468G

Command (m for help): t
Partition number (1-4): 1
Hex code (type L to list codes): 7
Changed system type of partition 1 to 7 (HPFS/NTFS)

Command (m for help): a
Partition number (1-4): 1

Command (m for help): p

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 1246 10008463+ 7 HPFS/NTFS

Command (m for help): w
The partition table has been altered!

Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.
Syncing disks.

Command (m for help):q

The final step prior to opening up the Toshiba and installing the new drive is to resize the filesystem to match the partition. I used ntfsresize for this. I downloaded the tar ball from sourceforge.net

tar xvfz ntfsprogs-2.0.0.tar.gz
cd ntfsprogs-2.0.0
./configure
make
make install

ntfsresize --size 468G /dev/sde1

The physical removal and installation of hard drives is super easy on the Toshiba A9. The drive is in its own compartment on the the bottom. Remove two screws and the panel will pop off with just a little pulling. The drive is held into a metal frame that is sitting between some cushions for shock absorption.

Answer 4

Almost definitely not. In the case of XP, I've only seen reactivation required after a full motherboard and CPU replacement. Hope you have that restore disk handy, though.

Clarification: You'll still need to activate, but assuming the hardware didn't change beyond the HD, it should succeed automatically online without any difficulty or a call to MS support.