HDD dying, question regarding cloning

[feather]

My Hitachi hdd is displaying the tick of death Could only boot up on the second try, and loading Win XP is painful. I'm in the midst of backing up all the crucial files (porn, mp3, anime, just data files) onto an external hdd.

When that's done, I'm planning to clone my C: with True Image onto the external hdd as well.

My question is, when I get the new hdd, can I clone C: onto it, bearing in mind that I'm running Win XP SP2?

I remember back when I was running Win 2k, there was a utility I had to run on the install to "prep" it before cloning, something to do with some hardware serial number or boot parition or whatever (something specific to NT based systems), this was back when I was an uber-geek. These days all I do is surf on the internet, spam GYY, watch Entourage and porn.

So what's the correct procedure, do I need to do anything to my current install to "prep" it for cloning onto a new hdd?

[beanzncheez]

Re: HDD dying, question regarding cloning

If all you're changing is the hard drive, then yes, it SHOULD work. I've had to do that in the past. As long as your cpu and mobo are the same, you shouldn't have any hitches when trying to boot from the new partition. Being that it's Windows, you may need to click your heels twice just in case.

[feather]

Re: HDD dying, question regarding cloning

Thanks man, I think it had something to do with the SSID (or is it SID) that I was concerned about. But after googling around, I think that only applies to networked computers, and there's a utility called sysprep--that's what I was looking for in my original post.