Hi All, A friend of mine from work asked me to reinstall Windows XP to his computer so I asked him to give me the drive so I can do it at home because I have more time to do it but I have a Sony Vaio VPCEB3F4E laptop and his hard drive is a 3.5" IDE drive. I have 2 cables for connecting IDE and SATA drives through USB to my laptop and also I have a spare laptop 2.5" drive which in my first attempt I installed the XP OS to the spare laptop drive which would boot the XP OS and work perfectly then I figured if I can use a disk clone software then I could use that to copy the spare laptop drive's newly installed XP OS over to my friends IDE drive which seemed to work absolutely fine and when I booted from USB (the connected IDE drive) it started to boot XP from the drive but then gave me a brief blue error screen then the computer restarts, I figured that this was maybe because the drive was being connected via USB so I took the IDE drive to work and connected it to my work Dell Dimension 3000 straight into the IDE connection inside the computer and exactly the same thing happened when booting XP, it just crashed and restarted. What I need to know is if there is a tried and tested cloning software that would make this work cloning from my spare laptop drive with the installed XP OS onto the USB connected IDE drive or even if this method will actually work at all. Thanks in advance. Marcus.
the problem you are having is that you are trying to run windows installed on 1 computer to run on another different computer which windows does not like. can only do that on same computers or maybe similar chipsets on motherboards. your idea is good except for 2 different motherboards which is causing you the problem.
