I recently had to replace a hard disk in a friends laptop, running windows. He didn't have the original install disks, so I used a live Linux boot disk & and external USB drive:
Boot the live disk mount the external USB drive to /mnt dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/sda.img umount the USB drive
shutdown the machine & replace the hard disk
reboot the live disk mount the USB drive dd if=/mnt/sda.img of=/dev/sda umount & reboot into windows.
This worked really well, but the two hard disks were of identical size. Window subsequently reported new hardware found (the hard disk), install its 'driver' and was fine.
Stuart
On Friday 19 September 2008 01:55:46 Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On Fri, 2008-09-19 at 00:12 +0100, Chris Glover wrote:
I've had success with Drive Image, and Acronis True Image (the bootable version is actually Linux based, but made to look like XP)
Yus both viable products, I was however trying to steer towards (F)ree products as this is ALUG. Also really unless you need the (actually quite excellent) multicast facility Ghost offers to do multiple identical machines at the same time then there is no benefit to using the non-free products that I can see. Even though we have a ghost licence I find myself using G4L more for single machine images because it is easier to get booted on modern storage controllers.
On the machine you are cloning, run sysprep (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/302577) This will let you prepare an image for deployment. On the target machine, just put in the serial number and away you go.
I was making the assumption that Barry only has one professional licence key and therefore doesn't have a different key to insert. Therefore apart from prompting on first boot for a different machine name etc and generating a new machine identifier (which is only relevant on domains) there is no real benefit to running sysprep in this instance. Also he will have to either restore the image and sysprep the restored image (thus adding another step) or sysprep his working machine before he images it and put that through the first run wizard as well. Also sysprep won't stop you having to go through activation, in fact it will most likely mandate it if being run from a OEM installation image rather than a volume one.
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