[windrock]

My old PC failed and I have moved that drive to my new pc as a secondary drive. I want to use Office and other programs on my new PC. They won't start up off the old drive so I am sure I need to move them to the new primary drive. How is this best accomplished?

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I think the only way you could use that installation of Office (in theory) is to make that secondary drive the primary and active drive, then boot off it into the old install of Windows that's on it. In practice, however, even that would not work if it's Windows XP, because it would detect a whole bunch of different internal hardware and would therefore refuse to run because XP does not tolerate such things. Windows 95/98 would tolerate it, allbeit with some incorrect driver issues which would have to be dealt with. But XP, no way. Even without the anti-piracy product-activation restrictions, XP just won't tolerate being moved from one PC to another.

And neither could you simply copy the existing Microsoft Office folder over to the new boot drive. That would not work for two reasons:
1. The required Registry keys and values (which are created when Office is installed) would be missing.
2. When Office was installed on the old machine, a whole bunch of support files were written to various sub-folders in the (old) Windows directory and you would simply not know how many or where to find them all.

The bottom line, I'm afraid, is that old install of Office is effectively useless. Ditto for the other programs on there.
Re-installation from scratch (from CD or downloaded files) is the only way to restore them in your scenario.

Edited by pip22, 23 November 2006 - 01:26 PM.

[pip22]

I think the only way you could use that installation of Office (in theory) is to make that secondary drive the primary and active drive, then boot off it into the old install of Windows that's on it. In practice, however, even that would not work if it's Windows XP, because it would detect a whole bunch of different internal hardware and would therefore refuse to run because XP does not tolerate such things. Windows 95/98 would tolerate it, allbeit with some incorrect driver issues which would have to be dealt with. But XP, no way. Even without the anti-piracy product-activation restrictions, XP just won't tolerate being moved from one PC to another.

And neither could you simply copy the existing Microsoft Office folder over to the new boot drive. That would not work for two reasons:
1. The required Registry keys and values (which are created when Office is installed) would be missing.
2. When Office was installed on the old machine, a whole bunch of support files were written to various sub-folders in the (old) Windows directory and you would simply not know how many or where to find them all.

The bottom line, I'm afraid, is that old install of Office is effectively useless. Ditto for the other programs on there.
Re-installation from scratch (from CD or downloaded files) is the only way to restore them in your scenario.

Edited by pip22, 23 November 2006 - 01:26 PM.

[Neil Jones]

Can't be done; rerun the Office CD again.