Possible To Restore Old Laptop Image To Bootable Partition On New Laptop?

My old laptop was Inspiron 8600 XP Home SP3 which I kept backed up with full disc image by Acronis True Image 8.0, and had successfully restored many times, for upgrading hard drive, etc.

Now I have a new laptop Inspiron 1525 XP Professional -- my question is, is it possible to create a new partition, and restore my disc image from the old laptop to this new partition, such that I can boot to that OS, and essentially have my old laptop environment intact, while also being able to boot to the new laptop's factory install OS when desired?

Thanks in adavnce,

 

Simple:
NO.

Reasons:
1. your old OS has also "C :" as the drive letter. This cannot work (or you waste a lot of time in that, what requires good knowledge how Windows works).

2. Your old laptop had another architecture (chipset, graphic, cpu, ..).

BTW:
probably some people say that it works.
May be....yes. But my experiences doesn't show that.

 

OK, what about with Acronis True Image Echo Workstation with Acronis Universal Restore... will that work? To migrate my old system to it's own partition on a new machine? (Such that I can boot to either the factory OS install of the new machine, or to my old system on it's own partition)

 

I think the short answer is yes, it is possible. The real question would be is it worth the trouble to do it and be sure it will work.

As MrMorse pointed out there are several pitfalls to avoid.

1. your XP image was on different hardware, so its not likely to work when you restore it onto a new mobo/chipset/driver architecture. Acronis offers a premium product (more $$$) that claims to be able to overcome these issues. Check out the Echo enterprise product for details.

2. Then you have to understand the issues associated with restoring partitions into multi-boot systems. There are articles on the Web that will help explain the potential problems you could encounter if you do things in the wrong order, so if you follow those steps carefully you can setup a multi-boot system.

3. assuming you get past obstacle #2, you then get into the realm of Microsoft licensing issues. Most likely the old laptop had an OEM version of XP installed on it, which can only be used on that machine, not any other. When you try to boot from it, the CPU will be checked to see if its the same one that the original version of XP was loaded onto, and you may not be able to get XP to boot. Opinions vary as to whether this problem can be overcome at all, so you may be stopped cold by this issue. If you have a full retail copy of XP then you can usually transfer the license to the new machine with a call to Microsoft.

So while the process is possible, its not simple. If you really need to have the old system available it can be done, but you need to know exactly what you're doing to get it to work the first time.