Imaging with free Macrium - Windows 7 Help Forums

Imaging with free Macrium - Windows 7 Help Forums



also:    http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/73828-imaging-free-macrium.html 



and

This article is incorrect and misleading. "You Should Probably Do a Clean Install Instead" is, for most cases, false. Besides sysprep, there are many inexpensive, and very expensive backup applications that do "dissimilar hardware restore" . Examples include EMC/Dantz Retrospect ( semi-cheap ), Symantec Backup Exec ( expensive ) or Arcserve ( so expensive that you'd need to be able to crap golden nuggets ). In any case, one can always go to the device manager and change all the device drivers which are system specific and update them to the generic Microsoft equivalents that correspond to the hardware on the new system. I've used this method for years without any problems. See, eg., here : http://reboot.pro/topic/15901-migrate-win7-between-pcs-without-migration-tools/9



and

Good thing I didn't read this article last week when I used a common freeware partition tool's copy disk wizard to setup three computers (hp desktop, toshiba laptop and a dell 2-1) with new ssd's....I've even swapped them out putting the dell Ssd into the toshiba so far all copies of Windows are still activated and I haven't had to call MS. Maybe I'm a wizard, my money is on lucky idiot though.

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chinmoy1955

Feb 2

Quite misleading article. I have cloned many system hard disk drives and installed them in newly assembled pc's with completely different hardware configurations, and every time it has worked like a charm. There is even no need to go into Device Manager to update anything initially, because when you boot for the first time, Windows detects the new hardware and automatically installs all the necessary drivers without asking you a single question. These are usually generic drivers, but usually most of the functions work at first go. The most common problem faced at this stage is the sound card, which normally requires new drivers to work. Next step is to simply insert your motherboard CD into the CD drive and go through the installation procedure for all the hardware peripherals of your new hardware. I have done this umpteen number of times without any problems at all. The software I commonly use for cloning is Acronis Trueimage Home, Minitools Partition Wizard or Easeus Partition Master free, all excellent software.