I have just purchased a HP Pavilon Desktop computer that contains
Vista Home Premium on the hard drive.
I do not wish to play with Vista for at least 6 mos. when some of its
kinks will be removed.
I have a hard drive from my old computer that contains Windows XP,
applications, & data.
Is it possible to transfer the contents of the old hard drive
including XP onto the new computer's hard drive after formatting the
hard drive of the new computer, or would I have to first install
Norton Ghost on the new computer.?
would I need the latesst vsn of Ghost, or would the year 2003 vsn.
work?
all opinions, etc.welcomed!
Aaron in N. Hollywood
So you only want XP on the new system? If that's the case this really isn't
a Vista question. Or do you want to dual boot XP and Vista?
To start with is the copy of XP that installed on in the other computer OEM
or retail? If it's OEM it cannot, by the license, be moved to a different
computer. If it's retail it can be moved if it's first uninstalled from the
compute from the computer on which it's installed.
Second issue, will your new computer support XP? Some manufacturer's are
not providing XP drivers for new hardware. You'll need to check on the HP
web site for your mode to see if XP drivers are available. If they are not,
then the whole issue is moot.
It it will support XP then there are a couple of ways to go about what you
want to do. You could just move the drive that has XP and install it as the
only drive in the new computer. XP probably won't boot though since the
hardware is different. At the very least you'll need to do a repair install
of XP on the new system:
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm
If the hardware changes are significant enough even a repair install won't
work, requiring a clean install of the XP OS, and then all programs will
need to be restored from original media, and the data restored from a
backup.
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/cleanxpinstall.html
You could use a disk cloning program such as Acronis True Image, Norton
Ghost or CasperXP to clone the contents of the old drive to the drive in the
new computer. You would need to uninstall XP on the old computer after
that, since it can't be installed on two systems at the same time, and of
course as I said before it needs to be a retail version of XP.
I've not worked with Ghost 2003 for cloning, so I can't say it will work but
I think it should.
There are other possibilities if you would like to dual boot XP and Vista.
You need to give more info to get more specific tips.
For what it's worth, I'm not sure what kinks you are talking about. On the
right hardware with the right drivers and software Vista runs fine. I have
been using it since last November on an almost 5 yr old system with 1GB RAM
that has the original hardware except for a different video card.
There can be problems with Vista on certain hardware and using some legacy
hardware and software. With a new computer Vista should run fine out of the
box so the computer hardware shouldn't be an issue. It's whether you intend
to use any legacy hardware or software and what exactly you want to use the
system for.
