Imaging old drive onto new computer?

[Guest_imported]

I’m building my first pc and would like to use the os, files, and programs from my old system. My old system is a Compaq 5838 –AMD K7 500mhz 256sdr, 17gig, 98se w/ built-in video and sound, plus cd rom, cd-rw, scanner ect. My goal is to set up the new system ‘i.e.’ Athlon XP 1800+, 528ddr, 60gig and AGP video card –“ with dual os’s”. The old computer came with a “restore” disk to reformat and reinstall to factory configurations. No Windows98 installation cd. I’d like to Image the old drive, os and all, into a new partition on the new drive and set up a partition for a new XP Home install? What is the best way to going about this? What problems can I expect and how do I handle them? Will third party software help? Thanks!!
HRS

 

[Snickle]

You could use a program such as DriveCopy from

http://www.powerquest.com

and there's others.

DriveCopy works fine with just one little caveat: If the source drive was fdisked for 100% [normal] instead of entering the size in KB/MB, DC will copy the entire drive to the entire destination drive, regardless of size. I just did a 20GB onto a 40GB. Now if I want a second partition, I'll have to run PartitionMagic and resize C and create D.

Biggest problem is that Win98SE may have been customized by Compaq and will only work with the specific hardware on the Compaq computer, and yes, the 'brands' are allowed to do that under the terms of the license for Windows from Microsoft.

 

[Guest_imported]

Thanks Berton. I was afraid the OS would be hard to reuse. But I guess its still worth a try. Thanks Again! HS

 

[wolluf]

Do you realise that once you've set up a dual boot machine, its a pain to remove one of operating systems (eg, as is likely, you'll not want win98 after a while - unless you have the odd program which doesn't run on XP).

 

[Guest_imported]

I did that to. Not to a new system but to a new drive. I upgraded my dells 6 gig drive to a 40 gig one. I used norton ghost imaging. Worked like a doll. Takes like 30 mins to make an image and like 15-20 to restore it. If they both have ehternet then you can image directly one to the other. Ghost is truely awesome.

 

[shagaxp]

Ghost..You can either love it or hate it. I use Norton Ghost 7.5 about once everyday. The biggest problem that I have run into is hardware compatability. I have run into problems ghosting one machine to another just by a simple change in processor speed, ie 1.5ghz to 1.8ghz, RAM types, etc. Then other times I have ghosted a new pentium 4 notebook with an old image that was created on an older PIII board. You could try to do the image, what would it hurt. However, I would just do a clean windows xp install on your new drive and hook your old drive up as a slave.

 

[paparazi]

I think people are missing the point here!
With such a drastic hardware change (complete platform swopout) the ghost image or recovery software for the original platform doesn't stand a chance of driving the new hardware!
Yes you could do a ghost image on the new harddrive but don't expect to boot from it! best you can expect is to be able to read some of the files.
Forever the pessimist! Martin Please let members know if there advice has helped any.

 

[piwadmin]

I'm trying to replace the harddrive in my PC. I took the old-drive out and inserted a new one. When attempting to load WIN2000, I get the following area:
File \i386\c_1252.nls could not be loaded. The error code is 7. Setup cannot continue. The old drive was formatted in an attempt to try and clear it out, so I have no way of going back to it. However, I do have a boot disk. Could someone point me in the right direction so I can load Windows2000 Pro. Thanks in advance for any assistance rendered.