The part about moving the installation from a croaked laptop to a new laptop is not a trivial thing.
Different machines even identical models will have different serial numbers on hardware unless the
whole thing is DOS or Win 3.1,?? It may be an even chance that it is only the hard drive that
died or lost boot info.? A lot of the DOS software can be run simply by saving the installation and
running the executable from a bat file, but some won't work that way.?
NOTE - All installation floppies for OS and software of interest and drivers must be backed up to CDs
and DVDs in such a way that either native installation media could be replicated or installed from
the CD or DVD.? This is important because magnetism and media will fail over time, Thumb drives
will fail when they get wet from sweat in your pocket or when they break in the USB port in the laptop.?
I sometimes find old floppies that are too degraded to be used or recovered.
If it is a Windows installation, Activation will probably be blown as well as licenses on some of the
software that actually cares.? There will also be device drivers that will fail requiring reinstalls in
order to build a working OS, then good device driver installations, then the rest of the packages
will have to be reinstalled so they can rebuild working relationships.?
If it is the case of the hard drive only -- Put the drive into a good machine along with a destination
drive for images and pull its boot drive, then boot from a rescue disk with your favorite image software
and get what you can before doing anything else.?
In addition to image software mentioned, there is Macrium Reflect Rescue image.? In an emergency?
the Direct Cable Connection in DOS or windows can be used with a null-modem cable to transfer on a machine
with only an RS232 port.? It is slow and won't image, but you can transfer files.? Bear in mind that
disk structures changed over the years, so you have to make a note what software package was used
so that you can be sure of being able to recover the image that was made.? Various earlier versions
of the Hirens Boot disk from 10 to 15 had versions of Macrium Reflect, Acronis, Ghost and DD and other
imaging software, and some even had Knoppix boot selections.? Knoppix versions 4 and 5 were very
versitile for booting into a GUI session on a lot of machines and is easy to use for partition copy and
building even for NTFS.
Good luck with it all, people have always wished for an easy way to move their whole installation from
a dead computer to a new one, but there is no one answer and few of the answers are simple and
usually require very different strategies depending on what you have to work with and where you want
to move it to.? You will want to study it all in detail before something crashes because you need to
plan ahead so you can do it in 15mins and not hit a wall.
