Cloning one VAIO to another

Hi all - I'm currently using a Sony VAIO VPCSB19 and I've just recently aquired a VPCSA26. The two machines seem to be almost identical except for the screen, so I was wondering if it would be possible to clone the VPCSB19 partition (using DriveImageXml via UBCD4WIN) and restore the image to the VPCSA26?

Thanks!

 

The new one has a quad SSD setup, thats a big change from a normal HDD. You can clone it but you should preload the image with the SA drivers. If you dont do this you will get a bluescreen upon boot.

You can use Acronis Home with the Plus pack for this. I did this trick going from SB1 (i5/HDD) to SA2 (i7/Quad SSD) and on to Z21 (i7/dual ssd and PMD). The SB --> SA step is pretty straighforward, graphics drivers and so on are compatible. 3G module might be different though but those drivers can also be pre-loaded. I used DriverMax to export all drivers on the new machine, added it to the external HDD with the Acronis image from the old one. Then boot with the Acronis tool, load the image with new drivers and ready to go within an hour.

 

Thanks Nick, the help is appreciated! Thats a fairly hefty price tag though ($80). I'm going to give a straight image copy a go and if that doesn't work then I'll make a plan with Acronis solution.

P.S. Does you know of a free/cheap way to preload drivers on to an image?

 

Everything I read tells me to always do a clean install on an ssd. This is because windows makes a lot of changes to the default settings to optimize for speed on an ssd, and to improve the lifetime of the drive. You can make a lot of these changes yourself, but I personally would not want to take the risk on expensive items like ssd's.
Your old system will definitely not boot, as the new system will be using different drivers for the hdd, either raid or ahci drivers will be needed.

 

I would not, there are hardware differences that might screw with you and for the amount of time it takes to back up new machine's image, copy the old machine's image, image it back to your new machine, find out it doesn't work, and place the new machine's image back to your old machine, you could just install all the programs you wanted in the first place. I also always like my machine after a reformat, it just feels faster (since i don't reinstall all the junk I only had use for once, etc). Fresh starts are a part of life (and computers )