Ghosting a hard drive

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technogab said:
Unfortunately you cant move it to another PC. Not to plug Mac's here, but I just imaged a Mac the other day, and you can take a drive out of a completely different model and throw it in another Mac and it boots up no problem! It doesnt even have to configure the new hardware, it just works. Even if it's a different platform. I took a drive out of a G5 and put it in a G4 and it booted no problem just as if I were on the G5(it ran a little slower of course) but it does work. You can even use an external Firwire drive and carry your OS with you from Mac to Mac.

I wish Windows could do this, because that is a great feature. I've been in your situation many of times, and GHOST is great, but only if you are using the same exact type of PC.

Well you see, MACs all use the same hardware.. windows is a PC and you can put any hardware device you want into it, made by different companys and so on. Macs software and hardware is made by Apple, Microsoft only makes the software.

But isnt their a way just to copy the folders you want onto another harddrive? Like say leave the windows folder alone, but copy everything else? Why dont you just do that, after installing windows on the new HD.
 
Restoring an image from computer A on computer B is basically the same as moving your hard disk with XP from computer A to computer B.

Moving the hard disk to a new computer works quite often, so I don't see why it wouldn't work with images.

My uncle recently restored an image from his old computer to his new computer (different motherboard, CPU and RAM) and it worked.
 
technogab said:
Unfortunately you cant move it to another PC. Not to plug Mac's here, but I just imaged a Mac the other day, and you can take a drive out of a completely different model and throw it in another Mac and it boots up no problem! It doesnt even have to configure the new hardware, it just works. Even if it's a different platform. I took a drive out of a G5 and put it in a G4 and it booted no problem just as if I were on the G5(it ran a little slower of course) but it does work. You can even use an external Firwire drive and carry your OS with you from Mac to Mac.

I wish Windows could do this, because that is a great feature. I've been in your situation many of times, and GHOST is great, but only if you are using the same exact type of PC.

it will work on windows me. xp intentionally tries to stop it to prevent pirating
 
Actually it wont work on ME either. You cant take an image from a PII and put it in a different PIII PC. The hardware profiles would be different and plug n play goes nuts to try and get the correct drivers and configure everything. It may try to start up and detect new hardware such as new chipsets and such, but it will either fail, or take forever to try and configure everything and multiple reboots would be required. Mac's dont do that at all, they just boot up into the OS just as if you were on the PC the hard drive came from, even if it has different hardware specs such as video cards, USB ports, Firewire, modems etc.

This is a big advantage a Mac has over a PC. If you sell your Mac, or buy a new one, you can just copy your hard drive to an external drive, then plug the external drive into the new Mac, and copy the hard drive over, and it's as if you were working on the original computer again. Or if you want, you don't even have to copy everything over, you can run the entire OS off the external drive.
 
technogab said:
Actually it wont work on ME either. You cant take an image from a PII and put it in a different PIII PC. The hardware profiles would be different and plug n play goes nuts to try and get the correct drivers and configure everything. It may try to start up and detect new hardware such as new chipsets and such, but it will either fail, or take forever to try and configure everything and multiple reboots would be required. Mac's dont do that at all, they just boot up into the OS just as if you were on the PC the hard drive came from, even if it has different hardware specs such as video cards, USB ports, Firewire, modems etc.

This is a big advantage a Mac has over a PC. If you sell your Mac, or buy a new one, you can just copy your hard drive to an external drive, then plug the external drive into the new Mac, and copy the hard drive over, and it's as if you were working on the original computer again. Or if you want, you don't even have to copy everything over, you can run the entire OS off the external drive.

how much do you wanna bet? you might have to reboot it a lot, but it will work
 
That was exactly what I said

"It may try to start up and detect new hardware such as new chipsets and such, but it will either fail, or take forever to try and configure everything and multiple reboots would be required. "

My point is, that most likely it will fail. But you may get lucky after multiple reboots. It's by no means a seamless operation. And it's where you cross your fingers and hope "Plug n Pray" works.

On the bright side, at least on ME you wont get the BSOD :)
 
technogab said:
That was exactly what I said

"It may try to start up and detect new hardware such as new chipsets and such, but it will either fail, or take forever to try and configure everything and multiple reboots would be required. "

My point is, that most likely it will fail. But you may get lucky after multiple reboots. It's by no means a seamless operation. And it's where you cross your fingers and hope "Plug n Pray" works.

On the bright side, at least on ME you wont get the BSOD :)

but this is where you don't know what you are talking about. it won't fail.

when we get notebooks that don't have a cd rom drive or computers that don't boot from cd, we put ME on them.

we take the drive and put it on another computer or notebook, then we partition the drive to 2 partitions and then we put me on the second partition and then copy the xp cd contents on the me drive.

we then put drive back. after 3-6 reboots it will load. then we install a fresh copy of xp to the 1st drive and delete the me one and turn it into my documents folder partition

it just a fact that ME can load on any computer. but like I said xp purposely stopped that to combat pirating, even though a simple repair will work
 
But look at all the trouble that it goes through. I've done many Ghost images ranging back from 95 to XP and 90% of them have problems when going to a different machine. Yes, it may work, and sometimes it wont. My point is that it is a hassle and will never be 100%. You have to cross your fingers and hopes all goes well.

You mention the process:
"we take the drive and put it on another computer or notebook, then we partition the drive to 2 partitions and then we put me on the second partition and then copy the xp cd contents on the me drive.

we then put drive back. after 3-6 reboots it will load. then we install a fresh copy of xp to the 1st drive and delete the me one and turn it into my documents folder partition"

That is a very lengthy process and a lot of work to do. Imagine trying to deploy that across multiple machines?

I understand that you can get it to work on ME, but it's a lot of work, and I would never rely on that as a backup. It's just too much of a hassle and too much can go wrong. And forget about doing that with XP. Windows makes it very difficult.

Microsoft worries so much about piracy, that they lock their own users out of functionality that would actually make their products better.
 
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