www.aiscl.co.uk

Hi,

I am planning on getting a completely new computer some time in the next week.

I am wanting to transfer everything from my existing computer to the new one. However the new computer has a completely different motherboard/cpu/drive/video card etc.

I'm sure that AISBackup will be able to handle it smoothly however the question is more that what sort of problems/issues with XP can I expect after I restore?

That is, will XP have a heart attack when I reboot because everything has changed or will it "just work"? I understand I'll have to install all the relevant drivers once the restore has happened but will I even be able to boot?

If there are going to be problems what could I do to mitigate them?

Many thanks,

Marcus

This is normally PC heart attack time as there is often a disk driver conflict, unless you pre-load all disk drivers before you start. Last time I looked for these I could not find the relevant posts on the internet, however we did discuss it here once:

What can happen is the PC start to boot then blue screen’s because it cannot find the boot drive, this is immediately after the ‘wrong’ disk driver is loaded by Windows. If this does work you could then use the new PC’s driver CD to get it up to date.

Here is a link to the previous post:

http://www.aiscl.co.uk/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=434

Has your new PC got an operating system on it? If yes and funds allow I would experiment using a clone of the existing Windows on a third drive (formatted as primary / active so that it can boot). You could always put the extra drive in a USB / FireWire caddy for future use as an external drive.

I just thought of another problem, if the new PC is SATA and the existing Windows is running on IDE it may not boot until you have preloaded the SATA drivers on the old copy of Windows. These drivers should be on the new Motherboard CD.

Barry

Thanks for that Barry.

I was actually thinking of restoring to the new disk and then doing a repair using a slipstreamed XP disk.

Microsoft recommend something like here:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.as ... -us;824125

Do you think that would cause the least pain?

The new PC won't have an OS, so I'm planning on installing XP, restoring via AISBackup then trying to do a repair.

My main concern is losing all my installed applications.

Thanks,

Marcus

The repair install should do the trick, please post some feedback once you have tried it.

I normally re-install all my programs when re-building on a new PC and then restore the data from backups. A good way of getting rid of all those installed and used once programs which you never get around to using again.

You will probably have to telephone Microsoft to get Windows registered, they are okay about transferring the license as long as you do not continue to use the Windows on the old PC.

Barry

So, an update as requested

(This has taken a long time because it has taken forever for me to get my case shipped to me, I've had a box full of kit sat in my garage for a month!)

Anyway, it's all worked well, the restore went without a hitch and windows loaded no problem.

Here's what I did:

* Created a slipstream Windows XP SP2 disk
* Built new machine
* Installed Windows with slipstream disk
* Installed AISBackup 2.5
* Restored the C drive backup from my existing machine
* Installed the Recovery Console
* Rebooted into the Recovery Console
* Finished the backup using "batch aisrestore"
* Rebooted Windows

And it all just worked! Of course Windows complained that I'd changed the hardware substantially so I had to re-activate (I have a version of Windows that allows me to install it on 10 separate machines).

I also had to use "newsid" to change the sid over for the new machine because I still have the old one running for a while (gonna change it over to be a Linux file server).

Now the install/restore I actually had to do twice. The first time after the restore I expected to have to do a repair install but Windows wouldn't recognize the installed Windows so it wound up trying to install again.

But once I just did the clean install and then restore it just worked.

So thanks to AISBackup I have virtually no downtime!

Marcus

P.S. For those who are interested in the exact change in hardware, my existing machine has the following:

Gigabyte nVidia-nForce2 mobo
AMD Athlon XP 2500+ cpu
1GB memory
ATI Radeon X1650 video card

My new machine has:
MSI L9N Sli Platinum mobo
AMD Athlon 64 X2 cpu
2 GB memory
inno3D 8600GT video card

I think I might have been lucky because the chipsets/cpu architecture is similar. Maybe with a completely different mobo chipset and an intel cpu it might not have gone so smoothly.