Sysprep or bare metal recovery to new hardware

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raytaylor

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#101429 1-May-2012 22:49

Anyone know if its possible to take a windows 7 (even better xp/vista) hard drive with a windows installation loaded on it, and strip out the hardware drivers so you can plug it into a new motherboard and boot it up if the old motherboard with a different chipset has failed?

I have been searching google and keep coming across backup software that looks like you need to buy the software and run the propietory backup/restore.

I know in windows xp you can get a 50-70% success rate by doing a repair install but am wondering if there is a product (like sysprep) that you can run outside of windows by plugging the hard drive into another working pc.

Im told that a windows 7 startup repair is rather different to a windows xp repair install from my searching and havent needed to do this yet for a windows 7 pc - but am researching for when i do need to.

Ray Taylor

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tatbaird

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#618146 1-May-2012 23:01

Have you thought about P2V through VMWare or virtualbox and then back again to your new physical platform?

raytaylor

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#618150 1-May-2012 23:12

tatbaird: Have you thought about P2V through VMWare or virtualbox and then back again to your new physical platform?

P2V?

i assume that is using the vmware conversion wizard where you can take a hard drive, convert it to a vmware image and then boot it up as a virtual server, and then do the reverse to put it back onto a hard drive?

Ray Taylor

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tatbaird

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#618152 1-May-2012 23:16

Yeah, P2V physical to virtual (using Sysprep), then V2P, the opposite.

http://www.vmware.com/support/v2p/doc/V2P_TechNote.pdf

raytaylor

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#618154 1-May-2012 23:25

tatbaird: Yeah, P2V physical to virtual (using Sysprep), then V2P, the opposite.

http://www.vmware.com/support/v2p/doc/V2P_TechNote.pdf

Bugger
In my theoratical scenario, sysprep wont run because the motherboard has just died and as i understand you need to run sysprep from within windows.

Ray Taylor

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Ragnor

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#618165 2-May-2012 00:19

Windows 7 is more forgiving than XP of hardware changes because it comes with a larger more upto date base driver set, chances are you can just take the hard drive and put it in another machine as the boot drive and it will still boot, windows itself with auto change the drivers because the hardware has changed, no need to uninstall specific drivers.

As long as the motherboard chipset is not too new/bleeding edge should work.

Take a disk image before you try this of course so you can revert to pre experiment state.

trig42

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#618175 2-May-2012 06:29

I have moved 7 and vista sucessfully using Acronis True Image with Universal restore.

dimsim

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#618190 2-May-2012 08:14

wouldnt take long to take an image and do a test restore to another machine. Or if you have shadow protect do a cold image using the recovery environment then do an HIR restore to the new machine.

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amanzi

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#618191 2-May-2012 08:16

What exactly are you trying to achieve here? As others have said above, Windows 7 is pretty forgiving in that you can swap motherboards without too much drama (you may need to re-activate Windows though).

sampler

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#618192 2-May-2012 08:17

Bugger
In my theoratical scenario, sysprep wont run because the motherboard has just died and as i understand you need to run sysprep from within windows.

You could get away with a cold clone of the desk into VMware ?

raytaylor

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#618451 2-May-2012 17:02

I dont really work in the hardware field - i mainly work in networking, and i had a personal friend ask me if it could be done, where they had not used any of those shadow protect or acronis products.

So i realised i havent needed to do this myself for about 5 years and I used to do a sysprep and burn a hard drive image to a cd for reghosting. If it hadnt been sysprepped, you had a 50/50 chance of an xp repair install working But i wonder how its done in windows 7 because there isnt really a repair install option avaliable - just the basic startup repair.

Not really trying to achieve anything specific - just realised i havent done it for a while and was wondering what you do now.

Ray Taylor

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amanzi

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#618484 2-May-2012 18:03

The reason I was asking is that if your friend is thinking about it from a backup perspective, then he should really be backing up the whole computer ? there's far more chance of the hard drive failing than the motherboard. And most backup software is designed to allow restores to be made to different hardware so that would take care of any motherboard changes too.