Imaging a HDD with windows xp onto another hdd

[Philippine Mango]

I've noticed that a lot of programs that allow you to do imaging of you HDD only let you image it back onto that HDD. So if your drive were to die because of hardware failure, you would be screwed. Anybody know of any programs that allow you to image your HDD onto another HDD that could have total different make/model?

 

[bacillus]

Acronis TrueImage 8

 

[crimson117]

Which programs are you talking about? I've never heard of one that does that. Perhaps it may need to be imaged back on to an identical capacity, but never the same exact HD, or even the same model.

 

[Sheriff]

Originally posted by: bacillus
Acronis TrueImage 8

Ghost has it as well as some retail HD's come equip with the software.

 

[Philippine Mango]

I was thinking of programs like drive image 7 or symantec ghost but they require the exact same volume which defeats the purpose of imaging. And even the same capacity volume would still be a pain in the ass..

 

[CAMS]

Originally posted by: Philippine Mango
symantec ghost but they require the exact same volume which defeats the purpose of imaging. And even the same capacity volume would still be a pain in the ass..

Who told you that? Ghost will work fine.

 

[Philippine Mango]

So your saying I could make a full image of windows xp and put it onto another volume? Well infact I already tried that and unfortunately it wasn't the image that didn't work but it was XP. I got so many errors from the image I gave up, don't know what I did though...

 

[jterrell]

Originally posted by: Philippine Mango
So your saying I could make a full image of windows xp and put it onto another volume? Well infact I already tried that and unfortunately it wasn't the image that didn't work but it was XP. I got so many errors from the image I gave up, don't know what I did though...

The problem is when ghosting an image you are copying config files and such. If the hardware isn't the same there will be glitches. Thats why most companies use Ghost to roll out identical hardware and then do it at a basic level.

If you were to take an image and ghost it then plop it into the same machine the image came from there would be no issues in all likelihood. If you want to take an image and ghost it onto a different machine there will be tons of driver issues.

If you simply load the OS on the new box from a normal cd-boot then use the tools within XP you can copy over the configuration.

 

[Philippine Mango]

I think that was the situation, it was the same machine but had problems. If it was a different machine, how would I go about doing this? I had so many wierd errors as I got to the loading screen, I can't even remember if I could get to the desktop or not.

 

[CAMS]

Originally posted by: Philippine Mango
I've noticed that a lot of programs that allow you to do imaging of you HDD only let you image it back onto that HDD. So if your drive were to die because of hardware failure, you would be screwed. Anybody know of any programs that allow you to image your HDD onto another HDD that could have total different make/model?

Ok, to answer your original quetion, Ghost & True Image dont care if it is not the orginal hard drive, they even help on resizing your partitions.
eg: If you want to upgrade to a larger HDrive, the orginal HDrive has 2 partitions, they will let you adjust the size of the new partitions. Also if you just make an image of a partition you dont have to restore it to the same size partition. You can even restore it to a smaller partition if there is enough free space.

However as said, restoring an image to a different PC may have WinXP bork when it starts detecting all the new hardware.