HeyJim - 2:31 am on Nov 11, 2007 (gmt 0)

Looks like I found my answer here:

" In addition, according to Martin Reynolds of Gartner Research, the copy protections that Microsoft put in place to prevent software piracy can render a cloned machine useless if the hardware has changed to any great extent. "Windows 2000 was actually very interesting in that it had something that we haven't really seen before or since, which is that the operating system was almost self-healing. If you took a Windows 2000 disk drive and just put it into a new PC, by and large Windows 2000 will kind of figure out what's there and load up and run it. Windows XP doesn't do that.

If you move an XP drive from one system into another system, it may never work again."

Can't risk that. Now this really complicates everything.