Hey guys, i know i havent been around for ages but my life is pretty hectic. Good to let you all know ive got a great job now as a computer/network tech for a good company

Anyways, here is my problem;

I have two machines, 1) P4 3.0, 512Mb, intel GAVL board. 2) P3 800, 128mb, tnt2 vid.

Now, these are two completely different boxes and the mainboard of computer 1 (p4 3.0) is NOT supported by windows 98. I have a removable harddrive with win98 installed on it. Everything was working great, put it into the new computer, and of course no drivers anywhere for it.

i looked and looked and couldnt find any support for this board and win98, so i put xp on instead (doesnt matter how, fresh or upgrade) So now the harddrive works well with computer 1 and its all great.

Now, when i went to put it back into computer 2, noticably because of the large hardware change winxp is going to have problems So it doesnt boot, it freezes (it doesnt blue screen....yet) and it freezes at mup.sys

Firstly, will disabling mup.sys in the recovery console fix this problem? If so then all is good.

I am looking for a way to have a removable harddrive run on both machines. The operating system DOES NOT matter. So, to me the easiest solution would be to get drivers for the GAVL mobo for win98, if someone finds them excellent.

The other way, would be to have xp running, which would handle both hardware fine, but then there is the issue of licensing and xp blue screening or freezing because of this hardware change.

I would like to note that i have Xp Pro SP2 with license and requires activation. and i also have XP pro (no service packs) on CD with valid cd key but does not require activation

With all that in mind, what would be the best way to setup the config im looking for. I would like the removable drive to be operative on both computers. I should also note that after i installed xp on the drive, i created 2 hardware profiles (old computer, new computer) thinking that when on comp1 i choose new computer profile, and on comp2 choose old computer profile.... back to the part where i put the drive in comp2 and it froze... So i cant get into windows to setup the old computer profile correctly..... other thoughts are that im barking up the wrong tree in this regard, as the hardware change is too dramatic.

Please let me know anyways

Cheers guys


CTO