I've never used an oem Windows license on any of my computers, except my 
WHS (Windows Home Server), but, rather, used the full version, so I have 
no experience with the oem licenses.

Now I'd like to take the hard drives out of my ancient WHS computer and 
put them into a newer computer.  (Hand-me-downs, both, but the hard 
drives are new compared to the older computer.  WD 640GB )

I realize that I'm not licensed to do this with the oem license, so I'm 
willing - if I go through with this - to purchase another copy of WHS to 
run with the new mb and cpu but keeping the old hard drives which 
contain all my back-up data and then some.

The question is:  how does it work to use the new license on the 
computer, while keeping all the data and settings on the current disks?

Do I just do an "upgrade" or something?

I realize that about two of us on PCBUILD are using WHS, :), but this is 
the same kind of problem that you'd have if a surge had blown out your 
mb, cpu, and memory, and you had to replace them, voiding your oem 
license, but keeping your hard drives and other pieces of hardware.  I 
don't think that there is anything particularly special about the fact 
that it is WHS and not some version of Windows.  But, since I've never 
done this with a Windows oem computer, I don't have any experience along 
these lines.

(WHS is based on Windows Server 2003. I don't recommend it to anyone, 
but since I have been using it, I want to keep it.)

TIA,

Dean Kukral

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