I have been working with a few tools like Acronis TIEWS and CloneZilla, and have a question with respect to deploying backups for the two of them. In both cases, I could use a disk cloning/imaging tool like Acronis to do a sector based backup, including a transfer of the partition table, and so on.
In the case of just a Linux OS, I can make a tarball of the entire root file system (ie: tar -zcvf / /mnt/someFile.tar.gz
), partition and format a new disk, extract the tarball directly to the file system root on the new disk, update my bootloader (ie: sudo update-grub
) and I'm all set to go. The new hardware is detected, drivers are swapped out at boot, and everything is great.
On a Windows (ie: Windows 7) installation, this never works. First, I need to have Windows be the first OS installed on the empty (partition-free) disk, so it can create it's 100MB boot partition. Then I need to worry about licensing authentication, and finally, if I get past all the nuisances along the way, the system is almost certain to crash due to drastically different hardware. I could always attempt a repair installation over top of this, but that seldom succeeds, and the system is typically unstable.
Why is it that Windows requires that it be the first OS installed on a disk, and why is restoring the OS such a convoluted nightmare (ie: can't just detect new hardware on first boot after a bare metal restore, and work with it)? Is there a legitimate technical reason for this, or is it some sort of legacy support, or is it something else entirely?
Thank you.