>>You're right - we install it as OEM on clean machines. Actually, it was sufficient to erase the registry to get it to accept the machine as "clean", which I did once and it worked.
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>I have also done the erase the registry technique but with mixed results. Out of 3 attempts only the first worked well, the other 2 machines booted but exhibited such severe problems that the disks had to be reformatted anyway.

Did it only once...

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>>Another time, when I was changing disks in my home machine, I actually hooked a new disk as slave, formatted it (fat32 on the bigger partition), copied everything, re-hooked the new disk as master and unhooked the old one, booted from a floppy and issued SYS C:. Reset, and it booted just fine.
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>Did you use one of the MS copy commands or some third party product? If you used MS did you not have a problem with coping hidden, system and read only files? I have not tried to copy an entire disk with the MS copy commands in a while because I use Partition Magic, but their used to be a problem with those file types (one reason I bought Partition Magic to begin with).

Just dragged directories one by one, to the other disk - it probably worked because I always set WExploder to show all files (one of the chores on a clean machine is to reset almost all the options in it - most of the defaults are utterly wrong, IMO), and then used a Norton Commander clone to copy the eventually missing files from root, windows and system folders. This clone doesn't give a damn about funny attributes :)