On Thu, 2008-09-18 at 21:25 +0100, Barrys linux mail wrote:
(1) does drive image software work ? as i thought for copyright reasons it was not possible to copy all of windows.
Yes commercial software such as ghost has been doing it forever, G4L as a Free option works very well.
(2) If it works does the receiving drive have to be the same size as the original drive.
G4L will handle it in a upward direction and simple partitioning schemes. Otherwise you might have to resort to parted or something
(3) what would happen if i put this new drive into another computer with a different processor and video card,will windows throw a wobbly?
This depends, across some chipsets will cause a BSOD, across different drive interfaces (i.e. SATA, IDE, SCSI) it can be a royal pain. If the partitioning is changing in terms of which partition is the windows partition then pretty much forget it.
Usually there are fixes, failing that you get a windows installation disk to the same SP level and do a repair installation.
Also unless the Windows installation you are imaging from is a volume licence edition then you will probably kick off the activation system again. This (depending on when you originally activated and it's general mood, may or may not ask you to call Microsoft and explain yourself before it will let you activate)
OR should i say what the heck and just put ubuntu on the new drive after running checks with the live disk?
Yes ! I would say, nobody needs two computers running Windows :)
Oh and I doubt I need to mention this but make sure that if you are doing disk to disk imaging you get the source and target drives round the right way ! It sounds simple enough but I have seen it happen enough times now.