On 02/03/13 18:41, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On 01/03/13 18:04, Mark Rogers wrote:
This is in stark contrast to almost never being able to move a Windows HDD between systems and expect it to even boot....
Actually that is a lot less true now than it used to be...particularly if you do it properly and boot the image on the original hardware and run sysprep with the right options before moving it
The only real gotcha would be if your mass storage setup is wildly different (ATA vs AHCI, or single disk vs hardware raid that sort of thing) and even then there are ways and means of sorting it fairly quickly.
Thanks for the comments guys - I'm quite reassured that when I take the plunge it may work! :-)
Incidentally, I have in the past had success with moving boot HDDs with Windows. I found it worked best with Windows XP, as that seemed to have everything installed, but a) that was when I stopped using Windows and b) I didn't install any of that Windows Genuine Advantage stuff, or any of it's successors, which, rather than be a genuine advantage, was the stuff that checked that you hadn't changed your PC and phoned home to M$ (allegedly).
Previously, with Win 95, 98, 98 SE, I found that I could move the disk, then re-install Windows "over the top" of the existing installation, reboot, download all the updates, reboot, and then it would usually work without having to re-install all the my user programs (word etc) - still I did have the advantage of having MSDN Windows install disks, which would do updates or fresh installs.
Cheers Steve