Using Win7 Backup

I've been using Norton Ghost 12 since 2007. It's showing up some incompatibilities with Win7. My netbook has a 160gb hard drive and full size laptop has 120 ... I'd like to switch them around.

Is it possible with the "make system image" to do this?

Note - the laptop is x64 and netbook 32bit

 

Read the following completely, then proceed if/when you have all the tools available:

First, forget Norton Ghost - especially as you say it has incompatibilities with Win 7.

Second download Acronis True Image trial.

Third - this is the crucial part - you need another, empty HD temporarily to switch the HD's easily and hopefully with no glitches.

(I would not recommend a DVD backup and using only the two HD's you list above - if something goes wrong, you have no going back and at least one of your systems will be 'hosed').

Now, using Acronis, clone the netbook HD to your temporary spare HD. Make sure that once cloning is done, you install it into your netbook and test all important programs to ensure the cloning process was successful.

With the cloning done to your satisfaction, take the netbook's original 160GB HD and then clone the full size laptop's HD to it.

Again, when cloning is finished, verify that all programs and utilities work 100% with the freshly cloned 160GB HD in your full size laptop.

Finally, clone the netbook's temporary HD to the 120GB HD we just removed from the full size laptop. When cloning is finished, verify all programs work as expected once again in the netbook with the 120GB HD installed.

With both machines now working properly you can format the 'spare' HD we were using and return to using it as before.

Hope this helps.

 

I am not sure if the Win7 imaging program can resize partitions so i would shrink the partition on the 160GB drive to less than 120GB before making the system image. Shrinking can be done with Win7 disk manager provided there's free space available on the partition.

Give it a try and report back, you can always restore it back to the original drives if it would fail.

Or as tilleroftheearth said in his post you can always use Acronis Trueimage - a hell of a good program and worth every penny.

 

Sorry, I may not have made it clear why to not use the Windows backup program to do this:

If there are hidden partitions on each machines HD's that contain a recovery partition, I am not sure Windows backup will properly back them up, nor if it will put the MBR back as needed to boot into those partitions on a formatted or new HD.

Acronis, of course, will.

 

In a word: No, not without spending money. What everybody here seems to have missed is that you want to transfer the image to different hardware. This will not work without some special measures. Since Windows needs a different hardware abstraction layer for the dissimilar hardware, all that would happen is an immediate bluescreen on boot.

It is possible to transfer an image to different hardware using commercial products, such as Acronis True Image with the Universal Restore add-on, but you need to pay for those.

 

Pirx,

Why won't my method work - given a spare HD and the free trial of Acronis?

 

Because the free version of Acronis does not come with the Universal Restore module, which you need in order to modify the image so that it can run on the new hardware. Without this manipulation, when you try to start the image on the new machine, Windows expects to talk to a different processor, motherboard, etc., than what is actually there, which will result in a bluscreen at best, or simply in a system that hangs during the boot phase.

 

No, he doesn't want the image to run on different hardware. He wants to switch HD's between the netbook and the laptop.

At least, that is how I read the original post.

If my assumption is wrong, then I totally agree with your assessment.

 

Ahh, now I get it, he's just moving the hard drives around, not the OS between the two systems. Sorry, my bad, you are right, of course.

 

Yup, just a hard drive swap. Ill give acronis a try and see how it works.

What I might do (and have done before, just takes a while) is boot into a live cd Linux and cp-rf the hard drive of both machines to a folder. Start the win7 install on both (one is x64 and the other is x32) to get a bootloader and then do cp -rf and get everything back on.

 

millermagic, you lost me there with the linux live cd stuff.

Just curious? Do you have physical install media for each computer, or, is this in a hidden partition on the respective HD's?

With the live cd, I'm sure you'll hose any chance of being able to do a restore from the HD - catastrophic if you really don't have physical (DVD's) media to reinstall the respective O/S's from.

Good luck and glad to have helped a little.