Moving Windows installation onto different hardware?

[quackers]

Bit of background, I dual boot at the moment with XP and Ubuntu. I built a new machine about 6 months ago and made this new box my ESXI test environment.

I've got some other hardware now that would run ESXI fine, I'm thinking of starting fresh with that and moving my existing XP and Ubuntu installations onto my newer hardware.

Now I've got a feeling that Ubuntu will probably be ok, but XP will go bananas and very likely die on me as it tries to load drivers.

Has anyone tried this lately, especially with XP?

What do we think, bad idea?

 

[bledd]

What sort of systems are they?

Quite often you can move from one intel chipset up to another without any issues, but I wouldn't really recommend it..

Some programs like Acronis True Image and Macrium Reflect claim to offer redeploying images to different hardware, can't say I've ever bothered trying it though. The option is there if you want to give it a shot.

Often it's the chipset and sata/ahci drivers that cause the upset. Things like LAN/gfx/sound will typically just not load on a new machine and be skipped as it scans for the new hardware

 

[Django x2]

Acronis is pretty robust at this but it's not without it's issues. I once used Acronis to image a VM and then redeployed that image to a physical box pretty much without issue! It was proper nailbiting though as for some reason, I just knew that what I was trying to achieve was verging on the ridiculous! That was a server OS though so drivers were kept to a minimum

 

[quackers]

Thanks for the feedback guys, the older system is a core2duo and the newer hardware is AMD quad. I might use Clonezilla to make an image of the XP machine first before I try anything and do backups of everything

I suppose it could work with the image

 

[Django x2]

There is a weird method I've seen of uninstalling all drivers through device manager before making an image backup. Could be worth trying