How reliable are "restore to dissimilar hardware" with backup/imaging apps?

[tracerit]

I have an old point of sale computer that I'd like to upgrade to new hardware. There are some programs and network settings on there that I don't want to change. What should I expect if I were to restore to a new computer?

 

[jkauff]

Acronis True Image has a "restore to new hardware" function. You boot up the new system with their boot CD or USB stick and it creates a basic set of generic drivers for your new hardware that will allow Windows to boot. At that point, you'll want to install all the real drivers from the DVD that comes with your motherboard.

I assume you're running XP on the old machine. Do some research ahead of time and make sure the motherboard has XP drivers for the hardware functionality you need.

 

[Viper GTS]

If you're going to the effort to do this at least investigate the possibility of moving to a virtual machine. That way you only have to do it once.

The other issue is a lot of newer hardware simply doesn't have XP drivers available. A virtual machine may be your ONLY realistic choice.

Viper GTS

 

[razel]

If it's Win8 you'll be fine. Otherwise you can run sysprep, then click on 'generalize'. That will make Windows hardware agnostic. It's probably the same command that the imagining utilities use.

 

[razel]

In addition, you may want to jot down hardware settings, like network, regardless. New, different network hardware may not retain the old settings on the old hardware.

 

[AlienTech]

I have an old point of sale computer that I'd like to upgrade to new hardware. There are some programs and network settings on there that I don't want to change. What should I expect if I were to restore to a new computer?

The first thing to do is, clone your hard drive to a new hard drive on the same system. You do this because it is far easier.. Once you get the new hard drive working on the old system you boot in safe mode and start removing, video, hard drive and other drivers from the device manager window and then SHUTDOWN the system but do not reboot and remove the hard drive. Technically you should be able to move this new hard drive to the new system and boot up and then update it with the new drivers for the new hard ware. There are programs to do this but costs an arm and a leg. You need a program if the old system has died and you can not actually load the old hard drive on the old system in which case you have to get a program that does it. Paragon had a program to do this for free until 2010 at which time they took it off the market and added the functionality to their paid programs. The old program still seems to work but obviously not been updated for 5 years means it might have problems but it free and still availableat some places if you search google for Keep your current Windows install with a new motherboard..

After running Paragon it will allow you to boot into the new system and add drivers it finds for new devices. But I downloaded updated drivers and added them in manually after it was all done with just for system stability. I think the manual way would be better as you can remove and "know" which drivers you removed from which devices and what old devices you would need in the new system. Sometimes you can not get drivers for some things so you have to make sure here is a way to get that up and running again which would be a pain if migrating from like XP to Win7.. There were a couple of cards which did not have win7 drivers and I had to discontinue using them. Keeping XP on the new system would work but XP might not have drivers for some of the newer chips and cards. So this is a major problem when changing systems. Always look at the things you need working on the new system. And check to see if drivers are available for new functions if you still plan to use the old operating system and if you could do without it. Adding new chips for network cards would mean losing the old settings. This was a major problem for me. Some said they found drivers for win7 but then I find others say there are no drivers and in the end I had to write down the settings and use the new network but it quite did not work out.. I was using 2 network cards and 2 ISP connections to do load sharing between them. Since the old network cards did not work, that particular setting did not work on the new system since the motherboard network and the PCI network card did not function properly to do load sharing, they would work as either/or but not both to get the speed of both isp connections. I needed some of the new functionality like more than 2TB of hard drives and those big hard drives did not work with the old system.

 

[dfgy]

yes you can, i have the same problem before, i plan to more my Windows 7 to my new pc, after search on google, it says System Preparation Tool (sysprep) can finish the task, but the operation steps are really complicated and there are some limitations. so i gave up the method. then i try AOMEI Backupper. it has a feature called Universal Restore, which is able to restore system to dissimilar hardware.
www.backup-utility.com/features/dissimilar-hardware-restore.html