transfer system?

[anton muzic]

Hi all,
I am going to get a used cheap pent4 system for myself(mainly internet, and some graphics manipulation) and give a relative my current pent II.
How would people transfer everything on current system to new and would it work?
I have a backup of whole system done with image software - is it a case of just putting the drive into new system, copy all files, and bingo! (being too flippant!)

cheers
anton

[saphalline]

The back-up image you have now is for that PII system. You can't just take that image and slap it into a totally new hardware environment. You will have to install a fresh copy of Windows onto the P4 system (if it doesn't have one already).

What you can do that's nearly as easy and much less messy is to take your PII's hard drive, jumper it to slave, and put it in the new P4 system as slave to the optical drive. Once you do that, you can use the P4 system to access and copy your files from the old hard drive to the new one. Keep in mind that you can't "install" any programs or apps just by copying the folders into "Program Files" but you can move all your data files very quickly and painlessly.

Then when you're done, just jumper the old hard drive back to master, and put it back in the PII system. Copying the files touches nothing on the hard drive, so when the PII system "wakes up" again, it won't know that anything has happened.

[anton muzic]

Thanx for that quick reply Saphalline,
The Pent4 is coming with Winxp, the PentII has Win98se.
Will this matter?

cheers
anton

[Paleo Pete]

For the most part no, the difference in OS won't matter. Win98 drivers won't work, some programs might not cooperate. Data files won't care what OS you use. (pictures, documents etc) I use Linux all the time to download drivers and security apps for Windows machines, once it's copied to my USB drive it's just data and they can all read it.

You can use the method saphalline posted, that should work fine, but only for data files. Pay attention to what he said about installing applications, they must be actually installed, not just copied. Data files can just be copied with no problems. Also remember the drive image won't work right with different hardware, you'll have to start over. That's the one drawback with using backups and drive images, change motherboards and you have to start over. It's still worth the trouble until you do swap hardware though.

If you prefer to stay with win98 you can use the drive manufacturer's software to repartition the drive, it should also give you the option to copy all data on the old drive to the new one. That will copy everything on the old drive to the new one, including a working OS. DOn't do that if the current system is having problems or needs to be reinstalled for some reason anyway.

As much as I dislike XP, I would say stick with that OS since win98 is quickly losing both hardware and software support, very few drivers are being produced any more, and as long as you keep up with patches and updates XP security is at least mediocre once it's patched up till next month...

Go to the Black Viper (http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm) service configuration and you can both get better security and shut down unneeded services that hog resources, and check the Applications and Security section of the forums for the "sticky" threads with links to some good antivirus, spyware and general security info, and put Firefox (http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/) on it before you ever put it online. Check the Mozilla site, their Thunderbird email client works well too and does not use ActiveX either, that cuts out spyware and browser hijackers installed through html emails.

[anton muzic]

thanx for that info!!

cheers
anton :)