Posted on 12/20/2008 6:59:49 AM PST by 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.
well ok
Ping—to the only person I know who would know anything about this. I’ll just stick to buying my Macs and getting someone to show me how to do stuff with them—LOL! (Usually 2nd Amendment Mama)
I Upgradce to a super quadrature fravistat
You nerd. :)
gnip...
The process I describe here would probably work for a mac. The hard disks aren’t likely to be that much different.
Ummm... XP didn’t complain about licensing?
Clonezilla is great. I use it to backup my system drive whenever I install new software.
I mentioned that. XP insisted that I re-register, but that doesn’t cost anything and is legitimate. The only thing msoft is interested in is that there aren’t two computers out there using the same copy of XP and, in the situation described here, the old computer is being tossed.
i don't know about how it is now, but... at one time when windows was installed it looked at what the processor and the chip sets were, then configured itself accordingly so switching motherboards/processors could be tricky when cloning since windows was loading drivers for stuff that may no longer there... so question, is windows no longer required to load to the installed processor/chipsets or does it reconfigure itself on the fly???
Yup. You did, at the very end. My bad.
I use Ghost and never had a problem.
LOL! The process you describe here look like Greek to me.....I pretty much know how to turn my computer off and on, get to FR and my email. A bit of an exaggeration, maybe, but only because of the help of 2nd Amendment Mama
That isn't necessarily true. If you buy a computer from an oem like Dell, the windows license remains with the PC and you don't have rights to move it.
Thanks for the post, while I’m not usually in the habit of migrating Win9x systems into XP or Vista hardware-friendly environments, Clonezilla sounds like it could be useful, and I thank you for the information! :)
Good question. The chipsets are obviously close enough, that is, from a mid 90s Intel chip to a 2008 chip, and XP was able to configure for a basic scren, keyboard, and mouse by itself, leaving me to load drivers for graphics, sound, and ethernet circuitry.
Upgradce that spell-czech softwear to.
I think Upgradce is in Slovakia.
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