Free software to deploy image to new/dissimilar hardware

malachi · 10 Jul 2015 at 12:32

I have a few laptops I want to image to a another one with different hardware. Old Core 2 duo laptops going to i5 laptops. I don't want to go through the effort of reinstalling Windows 7 and hunting down the software to reinstall. If I put the HDD's into the laptop's it BSOD after bootup. So I need a piece of software which will let me take an image of the old laptop and put it on the new laptops without breaking the OS.

I was able to do this a few years back with Paragon Imaging software but it looks like they have removed this feature from the free version and the version of Acronis True Image Home 2011 I have does not work on Windows 8 :mad:

Does anyone know any free software which will allow me to do this?

malachi · 10 Jul 2015 at 16:17

Journey said:
It's not just something silly like AHCI being enabled on the new laptops is it?

Yeah, already tried that. Still no joy sadly.

malachi · 12 Jul 2015 at 10:30

Thanks I will give that a try. I wasn't aware of sysprep as I always used 3rd party software to do it.

malachi · 13 Jul 2015 at 00:51

arknor said:
sysrep what?

how come when I went from an amd computer to intel the only thing I kept was a hdd and dvd writer.

windows installed everything on it's first boot?

It depends. 95% of time with Windows Vista onwards you can swap chipsets without any fuss. Only reactivation and let the drivers install but on this occasion I am not so lucky. First time ever actually.

Going to sysprep tomorrow.