Major PC Hardware Upgradce

self

[wendy1946]

Putting new computers together from scratch is relatively easy. A much bigger trick is totally moving an existing software system including the OS and every piece of software on the computer to a totally new hardware base.

Symantec offers a commercial product (Ghost) which is supposed to do that but which is problematical for several reasons. The Free Software Foundation offers a stunningly good piece of software along such lines:

http://www.clonezilla.org

I've used Clonezilla for work projects which have mainly involved cloning linux systems, and last week put it to a kind of an ultimate test which it passed easily. The idea was that my father had a computer dating from win95 days which had been upgraded to XP and a gig of memory but which was still stultifyingly slow and, my father being close to 100 years old is not really into learning entirely new systems.

What I managed to do was obtain a bare-bones system at a local marketpro show including a reasonable case, an Asus mother board with a gig of memory, a 64-bit dual-core chip, 160-gb SATA disk and a CD drive which can at least play dvds and all of that was just about $310 including taxes

Then the question was, would an image of the old system snapped with Clonezilla and xferred to the new one even boot and if it did, would XP be bright enough to at least give the snake a mouse and keyboard and let him try to load other drivers from the CD which came with the motherboard?

The answer to everything was basically yes and the ONLY little fly in the ointment was the RealTec audio circuitry on the motherboard for which no driver either included or available at Asus, RealTec, or anywhere else on the net would work. I disabled the onboard sound and added a $10 sound card to the system and alles was in ordnung. Google searches on "realtec sucks" turn up lots of hits....

The fact that barebones systems come without software helps the situation. That knocks a hundred to a couple of hunded dollars off the cost and since you're tossing the old computer, you don't need to be paying for duplicate copies of software. Windows itself will insist on you re-registering, but that's legitimate and free.

[jnsun]

Thanks

[Tunehead54]

Reminder bump! ;-)

[JRios1968]

I likce cheesce

[TomServo]

I stubbed my toe.

[TChad]

If it works, it works, so congratulations, but you are lucky that the new computer booted at all. Your technique loads a bunch of drivers that were not intended for the new motherboard. If you added new drivers, fine, but are you sure that you got rid of all the old ones? Had you loaded XP from scratch, you wouldn't have to worry about creating an unstable system.

Also, it is legal for you to transfer the old XP installation to a new computer only if you have a retail license for XP, which costs about twice as much as an OEM license. If the old computer is a typical Dell or HP, then it probably has an OEM license. I only bring this up because you do not mention the type of license on the original computer. I have heard of people talking their Microsoft reps into letting them transfer one OEM license to a new computer, but Microsoft is under no obligation to do that, it specifically violates their OEM End User License Agreement.

http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/moving_xp.html

Thanks for the tip on Clonezilla. The last open-source imaging program I tried was an old version of Mondo Rescue, that was flaky enough to justify my purchase of Acronis TrueImage Workstation and Workstation Echo.

[Tainan]

Good for YOu!
Great for Your Father...and thanks for sharing that bit of tech info. It answers a question I've been too busy(read - lazy) to ask and attempt.
Merry Christmas to You both.

[wendy1946]

I don’t think I needed to get rid of old drivers, so long as they’re no longer being used.

[TChad]

I don’t think I needed to get rid of old drivers, so long as they’re no longer being used.

If the drivers are still loading then they are using memory and processor cycles, and they might conflict with other software. Just because you load one driver does not mean that you have unloaded another driver (although that can happen.)

If you are interested, Mark Russinovich's autoruns utility will tell you what is loading, and enable you to decide what gets loaded:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx

But, that could lead to a lot of work. if the computer works and seems stable you may just want to leave it alone. Sounds like you got lucky.

Oddly enough, I tried your technique by mistake earlier this week, when I booted a drive on a new Asus mobo that had been created from an image of a C drive with XP Pro that came from a computer with an older Asus mobo. The computer went into a reboot cycle before I figured out that I had connected the wrong drive.

[Fire_on_High]

A recommended step on these sort of transfers is to change the chipset drivers to the generic Windows one before cloning it, and switch to the proper ones on the new system.

Oddly enough WinME was the most tolerant windows of new hardware...I cold swapped a hard drive I was originally planning to nuke and pave from an old 450 mhz box to a new AthlonXP 3000+ based box with nary a hiccup. Wouldn’t have cared if it went to hell, as I said I was really prepared to nuke it and just curious what it would do...since both machines used Via chipsets it went flawlessly.

Pity defective ram in the new box killed it within a few weeks, but the first couple days, damn was it a screamer. Til the bad ram ate it :-)

(To forestall all the ME naysayers..I lost a good number of 2k installs as well to the ram before I got it sorted, so don’t think of blaming the OS...this time.)