So a friend of mine is getting a new computer to replace his 8 year old relic. Here's what he wants to do: clone the old 200 GB HD onto the new 1 TB one (necessary to keep because of irreplaceable business programs and client data). Make sure the new comp works with the cloned TB HD (driver/OS kinks and all). Then as the long as the new comp works, format the old one, in order to gift the relic to his parents.

We thought to do the cloning by connecting both drives to my computer so as not to stress the relic.

I have a fair bit of experience in swapping out parts and google seems to think the clone process is simple, but, I thought I'd ask here before actually attempting it.

Does anyone have experience with this sort of thing? Stuff to watch out for? Tips and tricks? Best program to use and so on?

 

Intel actually has a great software that does this.https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?DwnldID=19324

 

Thanks for your reply chriar.

I gave it some thought and went with Acronis True Image WD Edition, since the destination drive was a WD one.

The cloning process was successful and went quite quickly (one and a half hours).

Unfortunately the new computer won't enter windows with the cloned HD. I'm guessing the hardware changes were a bit much. It starts normally, showing the mo/bo logo then shows the windows boot error menu:

"We are sorry but Windows could not start successfully. This may be because of a recent software or hardware change." and so on.

Plus the boot menu, [safe mode, safe mode with networking, normal start, etc]

Using any of the boot choices has the same result; the Windows loading screen appears for a second, then the system reboots on it's own, resulting in the same boot error menu.

I'm thinking of using a flash drive with XP to try and repair the whole thing.

Any and all ideas are welcome.

 

Yeah, it's the drivers.

What you could do is to use the cloned HDD in the old computer, go to device manager and uninstall any and all drivers for the computer.

I mean things like chipset, audio, mainboard, GPU, etc.

Then turn off computer, plug cloned HDD to the new computer, and retry. It should work then, because then Windows won't be using the drivers specific to the old computer, but a generalized one.

 

I managed to get it to start, praise google.

So what prevented win XP from starting wasn't the drivers but a setting in bios;
Sata:AHCI -> Sata:IDE. Win XP cannot function with sata drives apparently, so the bios emulates an IDE drive for it. Madness.

After that the system started just fine. Well, relatively speaking.
I got internet just by plugging in an ethernet cable ... both mobos using realtek ethernet chip was enough for the old driver to work. Also sound worked.

Then I went to install the mobo's other stuff, like onboard graphics, chipset and so on. Here's the kicker: the mobo doesn't support win XP anymore, /facepalm. Meaning I that I now got a sort-of working, unoptimized system working with vanilla xp drivers (like standard vga) that can't really be improved software wise.

I can't see another way forward other than updating to win 7. Boy my bro won't be happy. But who could've guessed gigabyte & intel would stop supporting win XP.

 

Everyone could've guessed because support isn't for forever. Microsoft has dropped XP, and the OS is a decade old. All security patches stop in a few weeks too.

 

Will drop. In April.

And yeah it's old. But 30% of systems still use it.

Anyway, at some point you just gotta let go.