Yes on Macrium, it requires you to have a licensed windows so that it borrows the PE boot from that installation
to build the boot disk.? As long as the hardware in the computer will boot and be able to use the device drivers,
you are good to go (although it would likely be a Windows TOS violation).?
Also a few years ago, Win10 changed the way it builds partitions, and a new version was required or the recovery
would fail.? Ghost failed a couple of times with the changes to NTFS and the new win10 structures.? This is why I
found it necessary to make recovery CDs and DVDs for XPsp3 and W9x and older and included the software used
to make the image, so I wouldn't lose track of what made it work.?
Nothing prevents (most) DVD drives from working in an old machine and there is a DOS driver for it,? The CD
DOS boot section is the same for the CD as long as the machine can see it.? So you can build a recovery boot disk
that boots into DOS with Ghost with the proper drivers that will recognize the rest of the DVD and all other drives and
be ready to go.?
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On Sun, Oct 30, 2022 at 01:58 PM, wj9jrg wrote:
Marcium is a good one, but won't run on below Windows XP.?
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Marcium is what I use, and then for OS's older, I use Ghost 8.
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For the OP, what was the issue with using Ghost 8 anyway?? It can boot into DOS and backup to any CD / DVD or flash.
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Thanks
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Andy
WJ9J
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.
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