Windows On New Or "Alien" Hardware
Hi, Fred, I want to say again how much I enjoy your newsletter. If I have a chance at keeping my head above the ever-deepening waters of computer complexity, it's in large part because of you!
I've been using "Image for Windows" from http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/imagew.html to regularly image my primary partition. I have wondered, though, how things would work if I had to restore an image after a hard drive failure. It's been my understanding that the Windows Registry is machine specific. What happens if you replace the defunct hard drive with a new one of a different size/manufacturer? And what if you resort to buying a whole new computer? How could the "backup" image you've so cautiously created be of help? Thanks again for your help! Sincerely, Virginia Adams
You're right in that the *hardware* parts of the Registry are indeed machine-specific. But your image backups probably would still work fine. Here's why:
Let's say your hard drive died and you put a new drive in the PC, and then restored an image created from the original installation on the now-dead drive. Everything else in the PC is the same--- only the hard drive has changed. And that's usually not a huge deal because the overwhelming majority of hard drives use utterly-standard drivers that are built into Windows. So, the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of the restored version of Windows starting normally, without missing a beat.
You *might* run into an inconsequential speedbump or two: If the new drive is very different from the now-dead one, Windows might run the "new hardware detected" process to set up the new drive, and then ask you to reboot once. On the other hand, if the drive is the same as or very close to the original drive, you may not even have this one-time reboot.
You *might* also trigger Windows Product Activation, especially if you've made a number of hardware changes at the same time, or have made many smaller changes over the last half year or so. But Microsoft allows for this, and the re-Activation almost always goes through without a hitch. And if the hard drive change is the one and only change you've made to the PC in quite some time, WPA may not even ask for the reactivation at all.
(I was one of those who worried aloud about WPA when it first came out, expecting it to be a major hassle. But I'm glad to say I was wrong about it: WPA is almost always just a minor inconvenience, at worst.)
And you *might* run into the kind of easy-to-fix "missing hal" problem we discuss in item #1 in this issue.
But usually, everything just works. Any hassles tend to be truly minor--- especially compared to rebuilding your OS from scratch! <g>
Virginia specifically asked about replacing a drive, and that's what we covered, but the same applies even for wholesale OS moves: The more changes between the new PC and the one the image was created on, the more likely you are to run into the need to install new drivers, to let the "new hardware found" wizard work, and to re-Activate your software. But the image still will probably restore OK to the new hardware.
Windows actually can do a pretty remarkable job of getting itself going on alien hardware--- far, far better than Linux or the Mac OS usually can do. That's one of the reasons why I'm OK with keeping my business records in Windows images, for example: I can take those CDs almost anywhere, and probably be able to get them going in fairly short order. To me, that kind of easy recovery, with near-universal hardware support, is key to having backups you can trust.
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