Ghost and Partition Magic

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G

Guest

Im wanting to restore my homemade recovery partition back to the system,
will it

A) format the parition before putting the recovery data back on to it, thus
any viruses will be deleted (B), will windows still b activated and validated
? ,(C), will system restore still work ok ?, (D)and will any products that
need activating like Norton internet secuirty still work ok?
 
If you used a product like GHOST, DriveIMage, TrueImage, etc to make the
partition image, and if you restore it to the same hard drive, then all
product activations should still be valid.

But, if you restore a "paritition image" to a new hard drive, then some
things may not work as well. For example, a partition image does not
include the MBR, so the new hard drive may not be bootable. That can be
fixed using the XP recovery console, run from the XP CDROM. Once in the
recovery console, type FIXMBR /? for more info. General links about the
recovery console:

http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/win_xp_rec.htm



http://www.wown.com/j_helmig/wxprcons.htm



http://www.xxcopy.com/xxcopy33.htm (near bottom)



If the new hard drive is of a different connection-type (e.g., SCSI vs IDE
vs SATA) than the original, a repair of XP may be required to incorporate
new drivers for the associated disk controller. These must be on a floppy,
not on a CD. Here are some links about repairing XP:



http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;315341



http://www.webtree.ca/windowsxp/repair_xp.htm



http://www.extremetech.com/print_article/0,3998,a=23979,00.asp



A new hard drive will likely also have a new "volume number", sort of a
serial number for the partition. This counts as one strike against the XP
activation, if you are using a retail version of XP. (An OEM version of XP
has its own, different rules.) In conjunction with other changes you might
have made since XP was first activated, this could push your PC over the
edge. However, at worst you will need to trade some strings of characters
with Microsoft to re-activate.



A new hard drive might also impact the activation of some other products,
but that is rare. I recall that a few years ago TurboTax used part of the
MBR for its activation. New disk = new MBR = Turbo Tax will not work.
However, the makers of TT stopped doing that, after a lot of bad publicity.
Today, most product activation schemes involve files on disk, including
changes to the registry, which is simply a big disk file, with multiple
pieces.
 
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