Do I have to sacrifice my current installation of Windows XP?

I'm currently running Windows XPpro on an Asus A7V8X motherboard. The CPU is an AMD Athlon XP. I have two 250 WD SATA II drives configured as a mirrored RAID. The drives are petitioned so that the OS is on logical drive C: with other logical drives being used for data and programs and media. My plan is to upgrade to a GIGABYTE GA-M55SLI-S4 with an Athlon 64 X2 CPU. The board also has a RAID controller but it's from NVIDIA. I've contacted support from Promise and Gigabyte and both sources have encouraged me to do a fresh reinstall of Windows XP. The techie at Promise suggested that the hardware upgrade would prevent me from ever getting into Windows to do driver updates. In short, he said I'd be blue screened.

My original plan was to use Acronis True Image to image Windows to a One Touch II external drive and to make a boot diskette to reinstall the operating system after installing the SATA contoller drivers. The Promise techie suggested this wouldn't work. He suggested a new install followed by a reinstall of the old registry to allow me to restore back to my original configuration. I don't see why that would work any better than using Acronis which should have a copy of the registry built in. Could I do a fresh install of XP without RAID and then install the Acronis image over it provided the drives were partitioned as they currently are? I see that takes me back to my old drivers, but I could remove or disable most of those before imaging. Wouldn't that force Windows to find new hardware and look for new drivers?

I'd appreciate any suggestions on how to move my existing Windows XP installation over to the new system. I have two years of accumulated programs and data and media on this machine. Starting fresh is not a terribly appealing option, and isn't this the kind of thing that one buys imaging software to do? Please help.

richard

 

True Image is used primarily for backups and restores of a specific system, not as an upgrade to a new system.

You may have success, though, and the only way would be to try it. You are moving to newer hardware which generally works better than moving to older hardware. Windows seems to detect better going up.

I do think you will have a hard time with the RAID drivers. The old ones in the image will not work and I don't see how you're going to install them before booting the restored image on the new system.

You may want to restore the image to the new system without RAID. Just use one hard drive. Boot into windows and see if it works. If it does, then install the RAID drivers for that motherboard/chipset. Create another backup using TI. Change the setup to RAID. Then restore the newly created image onto the RAID drive. Since it contains the RAID drivers for the new system, hopefully it will recognize the drive when you boot it up and start windows correctly.

All of this is just a guess on my part. Most computer techs, including myself, recommend doing a fresh install of Windows on a new system. You generally get a much more stable system this way.

 

If you have a version of TI with the Universal Restore feature http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/products/ATICW/ then this may work. If you're using TI 9 or 10 Home then you will most likely need to do a repair install of XP to make the new hardware work properly.