W7 Clean Install -

So far I have been plesantly surprised. I installed a small 40G HD and loaded W7 Ultimate. I have attached my old 100GB 7200 disk via USB cable and have gotten the base OS configured.

The Sound Drivers and Video were a challenge on the D810 but everything is working find.

The surprise is that I was able to move over a couple of application directories from the old disk to the new disk and the installed software works fine.

First, let me tell you that I do not install my software to the standard default directory. I ALWAYS create a new APPS directory off of the root directory and do custom installs from there.

Now I have not tried that with MS office. I think I will just do a clean install there, but it looks like I have been able to just drag an entire application directory over and it work.

I am wondering if W7 knows how to figure out all of the registry gobbly-gook in XP Pro or even if it was neccessary.

One of the applications asked me to re-enter my registration codes, but no problem.

I am pleased with the new speed which seems to be work the time getting legacy drivers to work.

I do have a problem recognizing the SCSI card in my docking station but not a problem.

I hate to go through all of this to have to do it again because I will want to put my 100G 7200rpm disk back in the machine.

Does any one know of a good ghosting program that will work with W7? I would be willing to try making an image file of this setup and lay it down on the boot partition on my old drive.

Eunix

Hi eUNIX

Partition Wizard, you can copy disk or partition (works very well with Windows 7) > http://www.partitionwizard.com/

Hi eUNIX - Welcome to w7forums

Check out this thread for Disk Backup solutions that work with specific drives
http://www.w7forums.com/backup-you-h...nis-t1489.html

By "copy disk or copy partition", does that mean you could completely copy for example your C drive to your D drive, ( OS, drivers, files, everything) such that if something happened to your C drive, you could literally switch over to D and keep operating?

And how does that work and stay legal with EULA? Just been wondering, because if you buy an HP computer, it has a recovery copy on a separate partition, but when you buy the W7 software and install it yourself, there is no recovery partition.

Thanks all. This is not a new computer that comes with the recovery partition. It is a new install on an old Dell D810.

Since this was a heavily used machine over the years, I had quite a bit of stuff installed that I wanted to keep. I have a more up to date TB61 and HP Elitebook and Sun Ulatra20 M2 that do my daily heavy lifting now but I still use this D810 for a lot of stuff.

What I did was take out my 100G drive and put in an older 40G for the W7 install. What I want to do with the copy is to image the 40G once I have "lifted" my applications from the 100G and make sure they work and put it back on the 100G boot partition.

This way if the transfer fails or is unacceptable, I can put my 100G back in and keep running on XP pro.

In regards to staying leagal with EULA, I will have to ready the W7 EULA to see what the particulars are, but off the top of my head, I don't think that it would because you can't run both at the same time on the same machine. I don't see why you would waste the disk space with a double install like that when you can just create a bootable backup or ghost image on a DVD and keep it in your back for recovery.

My recommendation to everyone would be to buy antivirus/internet security and a software to image your disk. Most PC's are not shipped with media these days unless you buy it in your package and personally, I would want to have the OS load shipped with my PC versus a pre-install image.

Ok. I am almost finished with my trial. I took some time to study my disk utilizaton on the 100G XP drive and now that I am comfortable with W7 running on my D810 machine, I am going to move the data of and partition the drive differently.

I am going to do a clean install on the new drive and repeat the migration of my apps back to the faster/larger drive.

It really was not that much work and it gave me an opportunity to really go through all of those folders and removed applications to determine a lot of the stuff that I did not need. Especially all of the JAVA upgrades over the years!

eUNIX

Saying Goodbye!

Ok. I have put my old disk back in and it is going to be difficult saying goodbye to an old friend.

I am going to load Norton Ghost 10 (since I already have it) and make an image disk of the machine in the event that I want to recover it.

Now what I would really like to do is to create an ISO image on DVD so that I can boot it into a virtual machine somewhere but that will take some cyphering (as Jethro Bodine would say! )

eUNIX