Does Drive Image XML Restore Properly to Another Computer's Hard Drive?

[allanc]

I tried to restore a Drive Image XML backup from one computer's IDE drive to another computer's IDE drive using Ultimate Boot CD 4 Windows.
The operating system was XP PRO sp2 on both computers before I started.
Both computers have Western Digital drives with difference capacities.
Both the backup and restore seemed to work without issues.

I immediately cold booted the destination computer.
The 'windows did not shut down properly last time ...' window was displayed and I chose 'Safe Mode'.
A number of drivers were displayed then the computer rebooted itself followed by the same error message as above.
This continued.

I then used the CD mentioned above to delete the master boot records in the destination computer.
Then I reinstalled XP PRO sp2 (including a fast format).
Finally, I restored the backup using Drive Image XML and cold booted the computer.
XP PRO started normally.

Did I miss a step or misunderstand how the backup/restore procedure is supposed to work?

Thank you in advance.

 

[seedubya]

Did the two machines have identical motherboards and/or other hardware? If not, the answer should be obvious. If the mobos were identical then it's slightly more difficult.

 

[allanc]

Did the two machines have identical motherboards and/or other hardware? If not, the answer should be obvious. If the mobos were identical then it's slightly more difficult.

They are not identical.
To me, the answer is not obvious though but I am always willing to learn, so this is a good process.
The destination computer was stable in terms of s/w and h/w.
So, what does the deletion of the MBR's, reformat and reinstallation of XP PRO sp2 achive?
Why would the restore work the after the above and not before?

 

[seedubya]

Sorry allanc, if that seemed a little short. I thought I was dealing with a tech, having read your introduction. You cannot just transfer an xp installation from one system to a non-identical system. XP (or 2000/2003/Vista/W7) does not play well in that scenario. It's all to do with what drivers are loaded at boot time and whether or not those drivers are compatible with the hardware you've just installed.

Simply put, your existing XP installation didn't like your new hardware; XP was resultingly BSODing during bootup and XP's default behaviour is "Reboot on error" resulting what you saw as repeated reboots. An XP repair installation would probably have fixed it. (removing all installed drivers and service packs ) Deletion of the MBR, format etc. was most likely unnecessary.

On a different note allanc, your intro. implies that you have a lot of technical experience. What you saw (the boot loop behaviour) with this machine is something that most techs would see on an almost daily basis. I'm find it surprising that you haven't seen it before.

 

[allanc]

On a different note allanc, your intro. implies that you have a lot of technical experience. What you saw (the boot loop behaviour) with this machine is something that most techs would see on an almost daily basis. I'm find it surprising that you haven't seen it before.

I have been selling a major national brand for years and their computers have been solid performers.
Typically, when the economy was better, my clients purchased new a computer when their existing PC did not have the horsepower to run new apps as opposed to it 'breaking'.
One of my newer clients has a 'taboo' system where I had to provide a loaner (with a copy of their old system).
I then had to restore the loaner onto their old system (the topic of this thread).
By the way - the copy from their old system to the loaner went very smooth .

 

[iladelf]

I'll put my own two cents in here and say that, in general, you CAN restore an image to another computer and have it work, so long as the chipsets are fairly identical. Broken down further, as long as you are moving from Intel to Intel, AMD to AMD, or Nvidia to Nvidia. However, this is not always true (yes, I know, nice waffling on your answer, iladelf...).

Examples: We have older PCs in our network that have small 40GB HDDs. I had to make a special 40GB image so that we could use Macrium Reflect to restore that dinky image to the old PCs. Works great, since they're all Intel machines, even though mobo architecture is different. Prior to this, I'd made an image of our brand new MSI Wind Netbooks, with all the bells, whistles and software necessary for our workplace. Guess what? I can restore the Wind image to any desktop computer in our network and it will perform flawlessly (so long as drive size is = or > than the laptop's drive size). However, restoring that image to an HP laptop failed miserably; never did boot into Windows, stuck in reboot cycle hell.

 

[abe]

BTW allanc, if you check out the driveimagexml site they do have some help articles on using it to restore images.

Abe

 

[allanc]

BTW allanc, if you check out the driveimagexml site they do have some help articles on using it to restore images.

Abe

I will take a look.
Thank you.

 

[abe]

try here http://www.runtime.org/driveimage_faq.htm#boot

 

[allanc]

try here http://www.runtime.org/driveimage_faq.htm#boot

Done. Tks.

 

[e2346437]

As an aside, I've used DriveImage XML before, and restoring from an image seems to work OK but you must run fdisk on the resulting drive to set it as bootable after the image is restored.

Also found that it is a fairly slow performer. Ghost is much better, but won't get some "maintenance" partitions, such as IBM/Lenovo.

Acronis is the best in my opinion.

Eric

 

[allanc]

As an aside, I've used DriveImage XML before, and restoring from an image seems to work OK but you must run fdisk on the resulting drive to set it as bootable after the image is restored.

Also found that it is a fairly slow performer. Ghost is much better, but won't get some "maintenance" partitions, such as IBM/Lenovo.

Acronis is the best in my opinion.

Eric

I avoid Norton products.
Thank you for the checkmark for Acronis.

 

[abe]

I understand avoiding their AV but some of their other products are cool.

Abe