Posted: 8/1/2006 7:51:29 AM EDT
What's better to dup a hard drive, copy or clone?
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well cloning will make an exact copy of the drive. you will be able to take the cloned drive hook it up to the same system and it will work just as it did with the original harddrive. just copying the data over to a drive: the data will be there but that particular drive will not be bootable. you will have to intall windoz on another hd to be able to access the info. unless you use say a exteral hd enclosure. or other means |
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Okay, so I just bought a laptop. It'll be here in a week or so. Is Ghost what I want to use to move all my sheeeit from my old laptop, or am I just going to have to reinstall and reconfigure all my goodies (like IM client, Azureus, Yahoo Widget Engine, Opera, etc) from scratch?
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ghost only works to back up the same computer. And the current ver will work if you want to upgrade the size of your hard drive but you dont want to reinstall all your software. it will put your system back the way it was but on the larger drive. really a cool little program. The problem with useing ghose for your new laptop is it will try and bring over all the system settings and drivers. the only thing that will happen on your new laptop is a blue screen of death if you try and boot. Its best to network them together and do some file sharing acrost the network or use a dvd writer to get the files you want to keep. also something i have never tried yet is the files and settings transfer wizard in XP you can access it from start/programs/settings/system tools. |
I've done that.... and a few times I've gotten away with it... It depends on the hardware differences between your old and new laptop.. Download all the drivers for your new system on a cd and try it.. I'd give you a 60% chance of success... If you don't bluescreen you'll be ok.... maybe.... just work through the marks in device manager one at a time.. Your new laptop will have the same system name as your old laptop.. but that's easy.. Half the fun of puters is screwing around with them.. 
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Making an image with Ghost of one computer will allow you to apply that image to computers with similar hardware. Using Sysprep first will remove all unique identifiers from the image. Ghost does not only work for backing up a computer. |
I'm thinking this sounds like the best bet. The old one is an Inspiron 8200 and the new one is an E1405, so I'm not going to chance the hardware/etc compatibility. Considering they've both got wireless cards and we've already got wireless in the house it should be a snap (knock on wood).  I'm wondering if the new E1405 would be a good candidate for a Kubuntu/XPmce dual boot. 
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