[flomo]

With NT4, I'm pretty sure both HALs were on the CD-ROM (unless you had an exotic system with a custom HAL, which came with its own install media). Keep in mind your use case is approximately nobody, you either had a SMP system or you didn't.

[amluto]

It was really not that rare to want to move a disk from one system to another. Except that there was an obnoxiously high chance that Windows would refuse to boot.

[flomo]

Yeah, remember the primary disk controller was set in the registry. (And on an SMP system probably some specific SCSI.) You could fix that, but easier to reinstall. Of all the things to bitch about, this one seems strained.

[bombcar]

That desire was much stronger on the consumer side which wasn’t really into NT 4 - though I do recall running W2K instead of XP for a few years.