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Move Windows XP to a new PC

I have a PC running Windows XP x86 and I want to transfer the current configuration to another PC.

My idea was to copy my info to an empty hard drive (or to a DVD-R that boots on another PC) and the empty drive was ready to put on another computer that automatically has XP with the same drivers, apps, and data.

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Cloning the drive is a possibility, but it's going to work unless the computers have virtually identical hardware configurations. – Cody Gray Mar 3 '11 at 13:15
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migrated from stackoverflow.com Mar 3 '11 at 13:40

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closed as exact duplicate by techie007, studiohack♦ Mar 4 '11 at 15:39

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2 Answers

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If the two PCs are the same hardware, you can use Clonezilla Live CD to create a harddisk image and copy it over to the other PC.

  1. Read the documentation!
  2. Insert the Clonezilla Disk and boot from it
  3. Create a disk image and store it on the external drive
  4. Boot the other PC with Clonezilla
  5. Recover the disk image from the external drive
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Note the options Clonezilla Live gives you during step 5 - you should use them to regenerate the computer's unique identifiers (else you could get two computers with the same internal ID, creating subtle bugs). – Piskvor Mar 3 '11 at 13:11
Haven't run into problems with this yet, even with multiple machines deployed and running at the same time, but thanks for the addendum. – slhck Mar 3 '11 at 13:14
@Piskvor: What are a computer's "unique identifiers"? I don't know what internal ID you are referring to. – Cody Gray Mar 3 '11 at 13:15
@Cody Gray: Sorry about the vague name, I didn't have to do this for several years, so I didn't recall the term exactly. The precise term is Machine SID. See also this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_Identifier#Duplicated_SIDs . Hmm, apparently MSFT denies that this would be a problem, and the author of a Windows utility which had the same functionality retracting his statement here: blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2009/11/03/… (he did start working for MSFT in the meantime). So maybe it's not such a major problem. – Piskvor Mar 3 '11 at 13:32
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