Windows Vista and 7 are imaged base, is that correct?

[Nocturnal]

A coworker of mine told me that image-based means that you can install Windows Vista and or 7 onto a hard drive and then take that hard drive and plug it into an entirely different system even though there are already IDE/SATA/RAID drivers installed and it will boot into Windows no problems.

I was able to do it successfully once with a desktop. I tried with a laptop but no luck. It blue screened. What does this mean?

 

[Aberforth]

No, I don't think you can do that- you will get an error. Image base probably means 'Image based' installation designed to reduce the total installation time. However you can transfer your existing copy to a new pc using 3rd party tools like Acronis Universal Restore that comes with TrueImage Enterprise but you are sure to get an activation error after you transfer it so only do it if your license qualifies for it.

 

[armstrda]

Saying that it boots up with no problems is a little bit of a stretch. It might seem to the user there are no problems, but I can guarentee you that there is a ton of registry and otehr stuff behind the scenes that gets "messy". However, the driver thing is also not quite true. If you were to take a drive that was installed on a system with only base IDE/SATA and tried to boot it on a system configured with RAID, it wouldn't work as the boot drive in windows would be trying to boot with a driver that the OS doesn't have. However, if you went the other way (RAID system to a IDE/SATA) there's a good chance you could boot, but Windows might complain. It's all dependent on how close the HW configuration is between the systems.

 

[corkyg]

Go ahead and experiment. I predict one result - a BSOD. If the mobo chipsets are the same, it may work, but that would be an exception.

 

[pcgeek11]

Originally posted by: corkyg
Go ahead and experiment. I predict one result - a BSOD. If the mobo chipsets are the same, it may work, but that would be an exception.

I agree. I've doe several " Same or Similar Chipset / Different MB Manufacturer " swaps and it has always worked for me.

 

[RebateMonger]

Windows Server Backup (and, I'd assume, Vista Complete PC Backup) both make image-based backups that, supposedly, can be restored to different hardware.

I say "supposedly" becaue I haven't tried a "different hardware" restore of Windows Server Backup, and my one Vista restore to different hardwre didn't work for me. But that was a long time ago and I may not have done it correctly.