Disc imaging ? best way ?

[(RIP) Kaister]

My missus has just bought a new laptop for her work asher old one is getting a bit tired.

Trouble is, the new one is Vista and the old one is XP.

Her work doesn't support vista so i have to 'downgrade' it to XP. This in itself isn't a problem but i also need to transfer all the old info across from the old laptop.

I was thinking there must be a way of doing this without having to reload everything folder by folder.

Can i make an image of the old disc and 'pop' it onto the new disc, OS and all ?

will this work on new hardware ?

Do i have to put XP on first - which is a different serial - only to find it won't work.

Her IT dept are in India - so they aren't much help

and i have to have XP on it first before they'll even talk.

 

[cookie]

Files and Settings Transfer Wizard will take most stuff across from old laptop to new one.

just run on the old machine and save the file somewhere (memory stick, cdr etc.), then run the wizard on the new install.

i think you will have to do a new install of xp.

 

[(RIP) Kaister]

i fear theres a whole lot more to it than just that


http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=212981&highlight=how+to+install+xp+m1530

 

[Slowdown]

http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/

I've just 'converted' my old XP laptop to be a virtual machine and I just run it on the new Vista laptop. it just 'worked' for me. As I need things I just drag them to the new machine, if that makes sense.

 

[cookie]

i fear theres a whole lot more to it than just that


http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=212981&highlight=how+to+install+xp+m1530

you never said anything about nlite, unattended installs etc.

 

[(RIP) Kaister]

its a link i found - not sure why all that stuffs needed.

thats why i think its going to be trickier than just a simple install.

 

[wheeledwidewebb]

An image file of the old PC disk is likely to be problematic, even though it may have WIndows XP already installed on the old PC, the image file that you create won't have the right hard disk controller drivers on it for the new laptop.

This is because Windows XP does not come with hard disk drivers for the SATA type controllers that lots of PC's have installed nowadays.

The same reason why you have to go through the process that you provided the link for. You cannot just stick a XP CD in and run a normal install because the setup will not find any hard disk controllers.

If you are lucky then you might be able to get the required drivers and put them on a floppy, then introduce them to the install when prompted to press 'F6' to install 3rd party drivers.

What software does she use that isn't Vista compatible?

 

[(RIP) Kaister]

She works for reknowned microsoft haters Sun Microsystems' - they try and use their own software wherever they can.

 

[Clive]

you never said anything about nlite, unattended installs etc.

That is just the way of getting non-standard drivers for XP into a bootable XP installation image for a machine with no floppy drive.

 

[wheeledwidewebb]

If you can get the drivers and they will fit on a floppy then you may as well buy a USB floppy drive hadn't you, they're cheap as chips.

 

[Magwych]

I had been watching this thread with interest for tips for my laptop disc upgrade, but it was starting to sound a bit tricky, so I stopped reading.

I have a Advent laptop with Windows XP on a nearly full 80 GB PATA/IDE disc

My original plan had been to make a back up disc image using an old copy of Acronis TrueImage from the old, the restore to the new...

The Acronis software has a utility to build boot repair/recovery CD, so I made one, booted off it, then created the back up image on an external USB drive. The back up took 1hour 20 odd minutes.

I then turned off the computer, swapped over the discs, then restarted the laptop and booted again off the Acronis CD. Using the TrueImage software I restored the image from the external drive to my new unpartitioned, unallocated drive. It did default to creating a logical partition, so had to change that to "primary". The restore application allowed me to resize the partition on the new drive. I chose not to use all available space, leaving me a few GB to install Ubuntu...

The moment of truth .. I shutdown the laptop, removed the Acronis boot CD, then restarted....The laptop booted into Windows XP, started up fine, ad launched my familiar desktop. XP did its XP thing, detected the change of hard drive, installed a new driver for it, then prompted for a restart. Et Voila!

If it had not worked I could have reverted to the old drive so had little to lose...Worth giving it a go