Gord has once again hit the nail dead center on the head. Since you've
already moved the old HDD off to be an external drive, installing/activating
fresh is the solution.

Had you been on a desktop, it would have been possible using software
provided with the new drive to first mirror the old drive to the new and then
install it as C: and press on with nothing but a couple of hours of waiting
for all the formatting and mirroring to be done. Doing this on a laptop is
problematic in that most don't even make allowances for a second
non-EIDE/SATA drive to be connected.

"ROBERT" wrote:

How do I transfer my office xp suite from one hard drive to another? I have a
bigger HDD for my laptop and the old HDD as an USB backup support. How do I
install from the old to the new?