Adding original hard drive

You're going to see a lot of people who tell you that a fresh install is needed. It might not be.

I have upgraded XP drives into new systems and upgraded motherboards with great success and not done a fresh install. A repair install seems to work fine for me and saves me all that work of reinstalling my apps and the 8 billion plugins I use. Look for 'xp repair install' on Google and look for repair install in Windows Help.

Here are a few critical things to consider first, IMO:

First thing is to download the service packs and burn them to CD and have them on hand as your file system will be reset to new.

Have all drivers at hand the new hardware.

****DO NOT**** boot into Windows the first time you fire it up... Boot to CMOS and make your settings as desired. While there set it to boot to CD first in order and open the CD drawer and put the XP CD in it. When you boot to the CD you will get several options (that you may want to research on Google) that will allow you to do a repair installation.

It will appear as though it is doing a fresh install so it will take just as long as a regular install... the time savings is in not having to reinstall the apps.

Remember that any your security updates are zapped so you will need to install the service packs before going on line even though you may see your OE and IE looking like they were not affected.

Repair Console is not the same thing as Repair Install necessarily.

Repair Install is a wonderful thing as long as you read up on it from *several* sites first and use a little patience and backup ahead just in case it doesn't go well. I have seen reports of issues that are greatly outnumbered by successes... but you want to be ready for the worst. Even if the worst happened, so what? You were going to reformat anyhow... may as well invest an hour to see if you can save many hours after.

Good luck

Your Mileage May Vary