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WinXP migration    [ Software ]

Had the pleasure of swapping out laptops recently - traded a Dell Inspiron 8500 (wide-aspect-ratio screen, but the video card could only drive the display up to 1280x800x32 - ugh) for a Dell Latitude C840.   The C840 has essentially the same specs, but has a faster hard disk (5400rpm instead of 4200rpm on the Inspiron), and its video display can handle up to 1600x1200x32.   Oh, and its keyboard doesn't suck.   So I went looking for ways to avoid having to reinstall the OS, my apps and all my registry settings - since I have both XP Pro and XP Home installed on it, I wanted to avoid having to do this twice.

Found this document which looks like it used to be a Q article on Technet, but doesn't exist on Microsoft's site anymore.   Basic idea is that you back up your OS using ntbackup.exe (I used an available Linux box w/ Samba which had 40+ GB of free space) on the source machine, and then:

* Do a fresh install of XP on the destination machine
* Restore over top of that fresh install
* Run an "upgrade in place" of that XP install to handle the hardware changes

If you don't do the last step, the docs warn of "not having the repair files present for your new hardware", which doesn't seem that dire for normal use, but even switching from an ACPI Inspiron to an ACPI Latitude fugged up the power management after the restore finished.   Looked like a problem with the HAL identification, which the upgrade-in-place fixed.   Anyway, the whole rigamarole seems a wee bit odd, especially coming from the *nix way of:

* Boot from bootable media
* Restore the data
* Fiddle with the boot blocks
* Reboot

which is even further reduced by using things like HP's Ignite-UX : make a bootable tape that automagically restores your whole system with no intervention required.   Just seems odd that you need to run an install, then restore, then upgrade, all of which takes about 3 hours with mucho intervention required.

Now, I've played around with Ghost before on PCs, even used it to build an auto-restore CD for NT4 + IIS + SQL server + KM app for sales droids to use as a demo on their Dell Latitudes, but I've had some bad experiences with using it to move NT-family OS's to new hardware.   So I was a good little documentation follower, and got to the point of doing the upgrade-in-place, except that the upgrade process kept stalling.

Turned out I needed to flash my BIOS - lucky thing I had gone through and restored both XP Pro and XP Home on the disk prior to doing the upgrade-in-place of XP Pro, since I could boot to a usable OS (well, mostly usable minus the HAL mismatch that made it ignore when the AC power plug was in use) and then do the floppyless BIOS upgrade from Dell.   Going from rev A07 to A12 made all the difference in the world, and things went smoothly from there.

So now I'm the proud user of a Latitude that can squeeze all sorts of little text and windows onto the screen.   Whee!