Journal phorest's Journal: XP boot (change machine)
Microsoft does some incredibly stupid things, for no good reason...
The most major and glaring idiocy in Windows is hard disk controller drivers. For this reason alone, I wouldn't ever suggest using Windows as a server (or on ANY type of system that is remotely important in any way).
If you take the hard drive out of one machine (perhaps after it has become a smoldering pile of metal and circuit boards) and install it in different system, there's an extremely good chance Windows NT3.1/NT3.5/NT4.0/2000/XP/2003/Vista/etc. will BSOD. It will crash and burn before you can even boot into safe mode.
You see, for some reason, Windows has a different, incompatible driver for every different brand of controller. For IDE/SATA-based systems, there are basically 4 (VIA, Intel, etc.). Microsoft's only official solution to this problem is for you to buy exactly the same hardware again.
To their credit, they now have an unofficial and unsupported fix... and it only took them a little more than a decade from the onset... Now that's a speedy response!
The solution [microsoft.com] is to basically extract all the drivers from a
There are a few surprising things about this. First is how screwed you are if you don't know about this BEFORE your machine turns to mud, as you can't boot-up your system in order to add the necessary registry entries to begin with. Thanks to unofficial options like Bart'sPE and it's remote registry editor, you can spend a couple hours sorting out the mess, locating keys, copying, editing, and finally modifying the reg files so they can be added to the non-running system. EVENTUALLY, if you know enough about what you're doing, you can get it to work, and finally be able to boot-up your system.
The second surprising thing about this is that the problem is extremely serious, fixing it after-the-fact is extremely difficult even now, (it was borderline impossible before BartPE), yet the fix is minor and has no negative effects, and still, in the past decade of NT systems with this problem, Microsoft has NEVER made this behavior the default. The files and information are all already on the hard drive of every Windows system installed, the OS simply just won't consider using them.
For some reason Microsoft WANTS Windows to crash when you change the hard disk controller. ALL other hardware changes will be detected by the system, and proper drivers automatically installed by (recent versions of) Windows.
The number of registry fixes I add to any fresh Windows system to avoid bugs, stupid behaviors, bad defaults, and show-stoppers like this on, is absolutely staggering
