Miscellaneous Dummy Questions

(To avoid confusions in the hijacked thread about screen captures, I think we could use a miscellaneous thread that can go in any direction.

In this case it is about trying to repair the damage done by installing Windows 7 beta as a sole OP system. )

http://cerb.ca/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=56146&postcount=37

If your really worried just go buy another hard drive (they are cheap now a days). Install the current boot drive as the slave drive and do a fresh install. Than migrate your files from the old drive to the new drive. If you ever need back into the original windows 7 beta install. turn the computer off, swap the drives around (or easier just unplug the c drive and have the bios boot to the other drive) and away you go. You can probably use a boot loaded are have the option to boot into either system.

Another option...

You can use ghost14 to ghost the windows7 install and restore it to another computer as a exact image. You will have problems with drivers (especially on a laptop) as the drivers on the ghost image will be from your desktop machine. I would suspect you would probably be able to insert the windows7 beta disk and run the "repair" on the laptop once you instal the ghost to it hopefully you could get in enough to remove the desktop drivers in the device manager and install the proper drivers for the laptop.

I would give it a try.

Thanks Mod, I am proud I have thought of both of these possibilities, that shows I am not completely hopeless :)

By installing a second hard drive did you mean an internal one? Because I have no desktop computer, only a few laptops, two of them with many GB empty space.

I was thinking of installing Linux on a separate partition and copy the files from the windows to the Linux part, but that would leave me with a non-functioning Windows system and I do have software that won't work with Linux.

I like your second possibility of copying the image of the old computer to the new one using ghost14. I was thinking of the same thing, making a new partition, because that is the only thing I know how, but I will look into the ghost14 solution.

I am sure I can find out how to make an ISO image, although I am sure it will take many DVD's. (I must have a software to do that, I already made images of other laptops.)

Am I right in assuming that after I copied the image I have to extract it to the same place and than copy them back to the old computer (after restoring the OS)

Thanks again everybody:)

With a laptop a ghost image may be your best bet... (or) buy a external hard drive (USB2.0) and use it to backup your files. Just copy the entire drive image off your laptop onto your external hard drive.

Sorry for the dummy question, but is a backup and a drive image the same?

I found this software and tried it.

http://www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm

The backup took over 130GB, which is more than I have free space on my external drive, so I would have to do some partitioning and erasing data, or buy a bigger one.

What I am getting doesn't look like an iso file to me. It worked fine, I could browse the files, no problem, but when I tried to copy the files from my main computer to the external drive, it said one file was corrupted, so I erased the whole thing. I would hate to realize something is missing when it is too late.

Sorry for the dummy question, but is a backup and a drive image the same?

Yes and No, the image is a backup but it's a snapshot of your entire drive. You would run this off a CD like you would your windows install cd. A regular backup can not access the running locked system files... so you copy a image program onto a cd and boot your computer using the CD (It would boot to a basic dos and do the image from that state so it can copy all the programs - since you are not booting into windows no files would be in use so nothing is locked).

Now, with the image it would probably be a non-browsable single file. So this is a good backup but not a good migration choice as you would not be able to use the drive image with your new version of windows7.

If the drive image program lets you make a exact copy (not a image but a file/folder bit for bit copy - also called a mirror) this would be good for you. Make sure you external drive is as big as your computers drive and mirror your hardrive to the backup.

Than install the new os and all your files will still be available on the backup (and accessible).

I would like to thank everybody for their help:)

I made a clean install of Vista yesterday + a backup.

So far - almost - everything seems to be OK. Some programs have to be newly installed, but it is a piece of cake compared to installing everything from scratch.

The XML backup is great. It restored everything, the settings, cookies, etc.

MS Data Migration doesn't work, but it doesn't surprise me :)

I can hardly wait to install Ubuntu and forget MS whenever possible LOL