Depends on if you bought a retail, upgrade or OEM version of the OS. With
retail and upgrade versions, MS will require a decent reason to hand out a
new key. With OEM, I have been told by phone representatives that the license
dies with the machine. OEM versions generally ship with machines built by
companies like Dell, Compaq etc and the "System Restore" disks have the OEM
OS in there and will only install on a machine with specific hardware. If you
built your own machine and purchased an OEM disk at the time you purchased
all the hardware, you scored a "cheap" copy but at the cost of no support and
a small chance of getting a key for another system. Typically a motherboard
failure can warrant the issue of a new key given that it occured in a
reasonable amount of time after the key was first used in an Activation.

"freddy" wrote:
[color=blue]
> Nate,
>
> You have to do a fresh install. You'll never be able to boot your new
> system using your previous hard drive contents. Toooooo much new hardware,
> and Vista will be looking for the OLD hardware, but won't be able to find it.
>
> Start fresh and call Microsoft for a new activation key. Microsoft is
> usually very accommodating in these matters, so long as you have a legitimate
> copy of Vista and it doesn't remain installed on the old system.
> --
> freddy
>
>
> "Nate" wrote:
>[color=green]
> > All,
> >
> > I just installed Vista Ultimate about two weeks ago. I am debating on
> > purchasing/installing a new CPU, RAM, Motherboard, and primary Harddrive. My
> > question is: Is is going to be possible to clone my primary drive onto my new
> > primary drive, install the new Mobo, CPU, RAM without major issues? Keep in
> > mind I do have BitLocker enabled on my primary drive. Just curious to see if
> > anyone has had success doing this yet with Vista Ultimate and BitLocker, or
> > would it be better to start from scratch (fresh install). My concern comes
> > from it being a new operating system from Microsoft, and re-activating the OS
> > within a short ammount of time (about two to three weeks when I finally get
> > all the parts together). I don't want to activate the piracy flag ;-)[/color][/color]