i made an image og my hard drive using powerquest drive image 6 and i ma wondering if there is a way to restore this image on another computer,because i know it would have a problem with the methorboard and the cpu,so my question is where xp sotres its hardware profile and is there anyway to delte that from the image so it would make a new profile for the new pc which would be installed on it.

Yes,

You can restore it to another PC ;) I have do this two weeks ago :lol:

But after you need to repair XP with your CD and all will be good :D

If you know I can right a method for doing that

This is the solution :

Solution 2; In-Place Upgrade to force hardware re-detection:


1) Review and complete Pre-Action Procedures described in the Pre-Action Procedures section above.

2) Change motherboards or move hard drive to new system.

3) Boot the system from the WinXP CD. Have your CDKEY ready.

4) Select the ?Install? option. (Don't select repair! The first repair option only verifies XP files against the XP CD versions and makes no system setting changes).

5) Setup will find the XP install that is already there and ask if you wish to repair it. Say yes.

6) Setup will run the upgrade code that will re-enumerate the hardware and set itself to boot from the new controller.

7) Install newer drivers as needed.

Note: Microsoft Knowledge Base Article:

You May Lose Data or Program Settings After Reinstalling, Repairing, or Upgrading Windows XP (Q312369)

/http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q312369

thank you for your reply i tried to go with the repair option but whenever you have xp standerd on your cd and the installed one is sp1 it wont give you the option to repair i dont know why.upgrade solve the problem for me but kept the hardware profile for the old one i think i have to clean this mess now.

I have XP pro with SP1 integrated ;)

Hya,

There is a way, but only if the chip-sets of the two machines are the same.

First do a small install on the new machine just to see if the ACPI is the same as on the old machine. If it isn't, create a new hardware profile on the old machine, boot from that hardware profile, and change the ACPI to be the same on the new machine. Do NOT reboot!!!

Now look at this article /http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q271965 and do like it says. I know it's for Windows 2000, but it works fine on Windows XP too.

Now make that image again, and restore it on the new machine. Everything would be fine, the machine will find all it's new hardware and that's that.


What goes wrong mostly in these situation are the ACPI system and the Boot Controller (IDE controller). The first is handled manualy, the second by the MERGEIDE.REG that was imported. If your sure the ACPI system is Identical, you might even try only importing the MERGEIDE.REG like the technet page suggests.

Hopes this helps.