Ghosting HD from one laptop to different laptop (1 Viewer)

[Patrick Sun]

Anyone know of an easy way of ghosting a hard drive from one laptop (a Toshiba Tecra 8200) to another laptop (a Compaq Evo N800c) so that you don't get a "inaccessible boot device" error screen when boot the hard drive in the new laptop after it's been ghosted?

 

[MikeyWeitz]

Ghosting is not really designed for the image to be restored on a machine with different hardware.

If you are using XP, then I would say remove all of your drivers (video,chipset,etc), create a ghost imgae ( I Prefer Powerquests Drive4 Image over Norton Ghost, or any of Powerquests products over Symantecs), then restore the image to the new laptop and before u boot into that image, boot to the XP install disk, go to insta/repair and repair the current installation. That should allow Xp to begin to search for the proper drivers.
If u are familiar with Sysprep, u can create an answer file which wil ask the OS to do a driver search, but that is MUCh trickier for the average JOE.

Your best bet is to plain and simply, back up what u need and do a fresh OS install no mater what OS u use. That will insure you are off to a much beter start!

 

[John_Berger]

Your best bet is to plain and simply, back up what u need and do a fresh OS install no mater what OS u use. That will insure you are off to a much beter start!

Total agreement. When you do a fresh install then go back to you old machine and see how much crap is installed on it, it's amazing how much you realize that you never really used and therefore do not need to waste hard drive space on the new system.

Plus, regardless of what others say, Windows does ever so slowly become corrupt over the months particularly under heavy use. Everything from installing a bazillion pieces of software to improper shutdowns will accumulate over time. (This is one reason why I clean my systems off every year and start over.) A fresh install is always a good thing.

If both of the laptops are network-capable, you should build the new laptop with a fresh install, install all of the applications from their original media, and just pull your data over the network. It fast; it's as easy as drag-and-drop; and you don't have to worry about an wasting time with first burning your data to an intermediary like CD-R or DVD-R.

 

[LDfan]

I've used Ghost here at work hundreds of times. I always stick to the exact same hardware specs from machine to machine, otherwise it most likely won't restore.

Jeff

 

[Patrick Sun]

I wish we could do a fresh install, but unfortunately this is a very specific load that has a lot of stuff built into it over the years, so I've decided to do a repair from the original W2K install CD, and it seems to have added in the correct IDE controller, which was most likely the culprit.

So now I'm on my way, downloaded all the usual drivers for the new laptop and burned them on a CD-Rom and am in the process of re-installing the drivers.

Next up will be testing of the applications and whether they run normally.

Whew!

 

[MikeyWeitz]

Dont be surprised if wierd problems start to pop over time.
Glad u got it to at least boot for ya, chipset drivers are usually the culprit for sure.

It used to be somewhat easier with win9x becasue u could install the OS over the current one without wiping anything out, it would just find the enw drivers and stuff.

I still reco a good fresh install, your computer and sianity will thank you for it ;-)