I've got a situation on my hands and need some assistance if at all possible. So here it goes, I've got a Laptop and a Desktop. The laptop was running windows xp pro, but now it has a bunch of corrupted operating system files beyond repair. The desktop is also running windows xp pro and everything is fine and dandy with that. Now what I need to do is "ghost" (I think this means copy) the HDD in my desktop and put the image on my laptop so it will run windows again. I think I need this adapter, because I dont have a cd burner on my desktop (link below)... http://insidecomputer.stores.yahoo.net/la2tode3hadr.html But beond that I dont know what to do. Could someone please help me get my laptop running again?
That will not work. Because the copy of windows on you desktop is installed around the hardware in your desktop and configured to be used with the motherboard and cpu of you desktop. That is why when you switch out the motherboard and cpu in a PC you have to reinstall windows even though it's still stored on the harddrive. So that leaves you with two options: 1) buy/borrow a copy of windows 2) use linux on your laptop
Indeed, if the two PCs have the same chipset you can often get away with it (for example changing motherboard and CPU from an nForce 4 AMD to an nForce 6 Intel will work) but with a desktop to laptop that's very unlikely to be the case. You'll need to reformat and reinstall windows the old fashioned way on the laptop.
It can work, but it's not always successful, and not always worth doing; i've done this on loads of machines over the years, usually Windows goes thru the motions of redetecting all the hardware and might be usable afterwards. Done this on Win95/98/XP but you usually end up having to reinstall Windows over the top, just to make it stable again, but it's worth a try if you don't want to mess about reinstalling your own software. Worst case, you'll end up reinstalling Windows from scratch. Now if you want a challenge, try doing this on Linux pc's ..and even more of a challenge, try it on huge Unix servers, it's great fun but highly satisfying to see it work, have had to do similar things on a few Production servers at work (but i don't mean to veer that far off topic, or scare you hehe!)
Worked like a dream for me, but then not only were both my boards nForce, they were both Asus, so I suppose it's a given.
Ok what about this.... Same situation but now i have a second laptop (works fine) that is the same make and model as the screwed up laptop. Can I ghost the good laptop's hdd onto the corrupted laptop's hdd.
So what I should do is.... 1. Plug my good hdd into my desktop 2. Take and image of it and store it on my desktops hdd 3. Plug my bad hdd into my desktop 4. Take the image from the good hdd and restore it to the bad hdd *By bad hdd i mean the laptops hdd with the corrupted operating system files *By good hdd i mean the hdd from the laptop that had good operating system files *all laptops are same make and model
1s_n_0s The way you need to do it is like sammorris said. You will need some software Acronis True Image. This is what I and use for laptop cloning/Back-ups. For desktops I use Norton Ghost on a floppy. Russell
Buy a 2.5" USB drive enclosure like this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817714015 Then put the hard disk from the 'bad' laptop into it. Plug that enclosure into the 'good laptop', then reformat the 'bad' drive and ghost the 'good' drive onto it. You can then simply take it out of the enclosure, shove it back into the laptop that was bad, and with luck you'll be up and running again.
So is there any special way i should format the "bad" hdd or could i just put it in the enclosure, plug the enclosure in, go to my computer, right click on the "removable drive" and hit format? BTW: would Driver Image XML be a good program to use for what i need? Thanks for all the helpfull information, much obliged
It's usually a simple case of plug in and format. I've not ghosted a drive before, but I believe Acronis software is supposed to be good for it.
