Learned a hard lesson a few days ago

Just built a new PC:
p43.2EGhz
p4c800-E Deluxe
1GB DDR 400 ram
Enermax 430watt PSU
FDD
Sony DVD-RW
etc...

I built it and everything went fairly well. In my old PC I had a Western
Digital 80GB HDD w/8MB cache as the master and a WD160GB HDD as slave/data
storage.

I built the new PC, added the old master drive, reformatted, installed
Windows XP Pro OS, and all the software. Then, after I was all done, I
decided to put my 160GB storage drive in. I had updated XP Pro to SP1, so
it supported it, as it did on the old PC.

When I put it in the new PC I also did a reformat from the WD boot disk and
continued to boot up the os. Windows XP recognized the drive and assigned a
letter, BUT it could not open the drive. SMART diagnostics from within
Windows said there was a failure. Ok, not the first HDD I've had fail. So
I removed it and rebooted. On the new boot I get an error message saying
Windows can not authenticate this version. This message appears at the
login screen. I click ok (that's the only option). NOTHING HAPPENS....

ok...so I try to rebooot in safe mode and see what's the problem, and if
necessary do a system restore. In safe mode I get the same message. I
can't get into Windows at all.

Call Microsoft...after about two hours on the phone the guy finally tells me
it can't be fixed. I told him I HAD to have the data on the good master
drive. So he tells me how to copy some files from the XP CD into my
c:\windows\system32 drive from the DOS prompt on the XP CD. Then I'm
finally able to get Windows to boot. He gives me a new activation code
since it recognizes this as a new install. Then I can get to my data to
transfer it to another drive, but all my programs are zapped, and I didn't
have a registry backup.

So I transfer the data to another old HDD and then have to reinstall
everything.

The problem was that since the new drive I was installing failed, Windows
hardware manager did not get a chance to recognize it, and thought basically
that the HDD had been moved to a new PC.

Long story short....Windows activation system sucks. Keep this in mind if
you think you'll try to install ANY hardware that MIGHT be bad. Windows
monitors hardware through its activation system to prevent a licensed copy
from being run on multiple PC's. If your hardware fails and you try to
install it, Windows may very well fail as well.