NTLDR is Missing

[Dashers]

I should think you'll be able to activate, they may even just set it to automatically activate at some point.

If you're going to the bother of rebuilding things, I'd seriously go down the virtualisation route. If you use "thin" provisioned disks the file that represents the disk is only as big as the data on the virtual drive, so they're pretty easy to backup and move about.

[Thumb]

Yes, I could do that, I'll think about it when the time comes.

[frownbreaker]

On old boxes its worth running Spinrite if you have a copy its a hard disk test program (non destructive)

[frownbreaker]

I do have and have had backup for this box for years so I wasn't worried about loosing anything but the computer itself with the software I have on it. I've really been thinking about taking one of my computers and rebuilding it and making it an XP box just in case this one does die which it will someday.

My question is if I built a new box and installed XP on it would I be able to activate it since MS is not supporting XP any more. I don't care about updates or anything, just want to be able to run the software I have for XP.

I had this issue and found a couple of problems

1) Moved to Win8 32 bit which has an XP mode build in all fine
2) Moved to Win8.1 64 bit no XP mode! So had to install Virtual box

I did 1) for 3 years as Windows 65 bit was a poor from a driver perspective then did option 2) once the drivers I needed were sorted now all fine. I'd recommend just doing option 2 as Virtual box is MUCH simpler and its portable (images of VM can be moved simply) the XP mode in windows is really a heck and best avoided.

Yes both options needed me to revalidate my XP install if new.

With Virtual Box you can migrate your existing XP setup without problem https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Migrate_Windows another route is to use the P2V (Phyical to Virtual) tools from say VMware and then migrate the image produced to a Virtual Box image.

Once you are on Virtualbox you need to keep it updated (its automatic) as they patch it to work with the patches that Microsoft ship for XP!