Steve Erbach
erbachs at gmail.com
Fri May 30 05:16:56 CDT 2008
Lembit, Jon, and Jim L., Our network administrator at work had good things to say about Acronis. However he seemed to think that to really get the "restore the system to dissimilar hardware" to work right, one needed to do image backups onto DVD. That's what he said. He did offer an alternative, though, one that might just do the trick. Here's the routine (assuming IDE drives...but it's similar for SATA): 1) Install a new IDE controller card in the old PC and make sure the current drivers are installed. 2) Shut down the old PC, disconnect the C: drive (the one you want to transfer to the new box) from the internal IDE controller, wire it up to the new IDE controller, and fire up the old PC to ensure that the C: drive will boot from the new controller. Shut down. 3) Install that same new IDE controller card in the NEW PC along with the old C: drive. Unhook the new PC's C: drive from its internal controllers and just let it sit there unpowered for a while. (I'm not sure whether the new PC should be booted with just the new IDE controller card installed. I'm not clear on whether the ROMs in the PC are supposed to recognize the new hardware first...if that's even something that normally happens. Does the hard disk store all the configuration information?) 4) Fire up the NEW PC. The old disk drive SHOULD boot from that new IDE controller. Then Windows on the old drive will detect that there's new hardware that requires drivers: sound, video, etc. The key to all this is that the drive should "know" about the controller it's hooked to. All the other drivers are secondary to the disk controller. If the boot drive already has drivers for that particular controller then it should be happy to boot from it and the rest of the drivers can be installed when the "new hardware detected" messages appear. 5) Once all the drivers are installed, the old drive should be ready to go as the main boot drive in the new system with all the old programs in place and ready to go. 6) Finally, reconnect the new drive in a slave mode, use Casper (our net admin's favorite) to clone the old drive onto the new one, unhook the old drive and set the new drive to be the master, and fire up the new PC with its newly cloned new drive...and Bob's your uncle, Fanny's your aunt. All of this is simpler if one uses SATA drives, but the fact that it appears possible with plain old IDE drives is very encouraging...all for the cost of an IDE controller and Casper. Steve Erbach Neenah, WI USA On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 5:11 PM, Lembit Soobik <lembit.dbamail at t-online.de> wrote: > look at "Acronis true image echo workstation". it might do the job, but I > have not tested it. > from their site: > " > An ideal solution for backup and disaster recovery of the entire office > network or a local computer, Acronis(R) True Image EchoT Workstation gives you > many options, including the ability to backup an entire system or individual > files or folders; perform a disaster recovery backup or restore files, > folders, or an entire disk from an image; manage backup/restore tasks > remotely; restore the system to dissimilar hardware; and much more. Download > Free Trial now > > " > and if you try it, let me know how it works > > Lembit > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Steve Erbach" <erbachs at gmail.com> > To: "Discussion of Hardware and Software issues" > <dba-tech at databaseadvisors.com> > Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2008 12:16 AM > Subject: [dba-Tech] Really and for true, how can I... > > >> ...take a perfectly good, bootable IDE hard disk from one PC that's >> seen better days and mount it in a new PC with a new hard disk, and >> make the old drive boot the new PC? I mean, really. Are we forever >> doomed to having to re-install every bleeping bit of software on a new >> PC? >> >> I ask because it can become very problematical to re-install some >> software if there never was a CD for it. Besides the fact that it >> could take hours and hours to go through the routine and download all >> the farging upgrades to get everything on the new system to the point >> that it's as usable as the old PC.