Old Machine -- New Machine?

Suppose I buy a new machine - complete with new hard drives.
I know I can clone the hard drives on my old machine onto the new
machine's drives, but I have run into trouble before trying to use a
boot drive or copy thereof from an old machine on a different machine.
How can I do this more easily?

I know I can re-install all the apps and then copy all my data from
backup, but is there a faster way?

Thanks

-GECKO

"gecko" wrote in message
...
Suppose I buy a new machine - complete with new hard drives.
I know I can clone the hard drives on my old machine onto the new
machine's drives, but I have run into trouble before trying to use a
boot drive or copy thereof from an old machine on a different machine.
How can I do this more easily?

I know I can re-install all the apps and then copy all my data from
backup, but is there a faster way?

Not for free (that I know of). There is software that will transfer things
from one machine to another, but you are not just looking at files, but you
need registry settings and system DLLs, OCXs etc. If I were you, I would
re-install everything. This will give you nice clean installations, rather
than pulling over old installations of software along with problems and/or
inflated registry keys etc.

I think windows has a settings transfer wizard for the basic stuff, but not
sure how much it does.

gecko wrote:
Suppose I buy a new machine - complete with new hard drives.
I know I can clone the hard drives on my old machine onto the new
machine's drives, but I have run into trouble before trying to use a
boot drive or copy thereof from an old machine on a different machine.
How can I do this more easily?

I know I can re-install all the apps and then copy all my data from
backup, but is there a faster way?

Thanks

-GECKO

You can't clone the drive. Or at least it will not be as simple as you
think. The motherboards and hardware will be different and the drivers
different. You could clone and then do a repair install to fix maybe,
I'm not the expert in this area, just passing on what I hear.
I normally just reload. If you have a cloning software, you might
consider a reload with a little bit of apps install and setup and then
clone the new system. It will give you a virgin config to save as a
valid system restore that will be 10 times faster to restore than a reload.

On Wed, 03 Sep 2008 10:30:54 GMT, gecko
wrote:

Suppose I buy a new machine - complete with new hard drives.
I know I can clone the hard drives on my old machine onto the new
machine's drives, but I have run into trouble before trying to use a
boot drive or copy thereof from an old machine on a different machine.
How can I do this more easily?

I know I can re-install all the apps and then copy all my data from
backup, but is there a faster way?

Thanks

-GECKO


The basic process is to make the clone drive image onto the
new drive with that new drive in the old system. Next boot
that and uninstall any hardware specific drivers and apps in
add/remove programs. Next change the hard drive controller
to a generic Microsoft driver if it was using a chipset
spectific driver, and see the linked docs for more hints.
http://69.36.166.207/usr_1034/Move_M...d_System .zip

Basically, windows will plug-n-play the hardware changes so
long as it can find the boot drive on the new drive
controller and finish booting far enough into windows to
begin plug-n-playing new hardware. The one thing I'm most
unsure about is if the original was PATA and you have a
system with a newer SATA controllers, what it'll take to do
that. If they work in emulation mode I'd expect it to be
ok but otherwise, I don't know.

The quickest path may just be to go ahead and dupe the old
drive to the new one and try it to see what happens and
proceed from there.

On Wed, 03 Sep 2008 10:30:54 +0000, gecko thoughfully wrote:

Suppose I buy a new machine - complete with new hard drives. I know I
can clone the hard drives on my old machine onto the new machine's
drives, but I have run into trouble before trying to use a boot drive or
copy thereof from an old machine on a different machine. How can I do
this more easily?

I know I can re-install all the apps and then copy all my data from
backup, but is there a faster way?

Thanks

-GECKO

True. I think you could network the 2 PCs so data is available to both
machines, then you can copy over whatever you or simply share. The
problem occurs when you need to execute programs on the old machine on
the new machine. Many programs install components to C:\windows and c:
\program files so identification would be tricky and reinstallation safer.

Another alternative is to install the HD from the old PC into the new
PC. It would show up as another partition or drive, like D:\ However,
there may still be problems with applications which install to c:\windows
or c:\program files.