Moving An Old Windows Install To New Hardware
Joe M posted in Home Support on April 14th, 2010
I have an old Compaq workstation, loaded with Windows XP.
It’s in the back room.
I have some software installed on it, that was a nightmare to configure.
It took me a long time, and a great deal of heartache.
Recently, the machine has begun to freeze at a black screen.
No blue screen, no error messages, just freezing.
Seeing that the machine is about 8 years old…
I dug through my resources, and found a newer P4. Not really all that new, but better than the Compaq.
It’s completely different hardware.
I was not about to re-install everything.
I made up my mind.
I WOULD find a way to get the image from the old Compaq working on the newer P4.
I used clonezilla and made an image copy.
I copied the image to the hard drive from the Compaq and put it on the P4.
When I rebooted, I got INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE (the dreaded BSOD).
After a quick Google search… I came across an article here.
I followed the instructions, carefully.
Fifteen minutes later, the P4 was up and running, with the image from the Compaq!
Things I would add to the instructions…
Boot into Safe Mode, first.
Gather your network card drivers and video drivers, ahead of time.
Once you get the machine booted into a full, regular boot, take and install the drivers.
Once you get the network card driver installed, it will be easier to get the rest of the drivers to install.
The considerations I gained from this:
The two main differences in Windows installs, on different hardware, are usually video and IDE drivers.
If you can revert those drivers to the ‘plain vanilla’ Windows native, you may be able to get the image to boot without the help of the article.
So… ultimately… it is entirely possible to copy a complete install from one machine to another and get it to work, even though the hardware is different.