Acronis 9 Home question

I am new to this, so please exuse the dumb question.

I have a computer at home and one at my office. I would like to clone my home HD to my office HD. Is this possible and would it work?
thanks

Home computer
AMD 2500+, XP Pro, 512 ram, WD 80gig HD

Office computer
P4 3000, XP Pro, 512 ram, WD 160 HD

 

I wouldn't.
The only way it might work is if they had the exact same CPU/Motherboard/chipset/drivers, etc.
Yours are different.

 

Windows licensing issues aside, I would guess that it wouldn't work well. Cloning is designed for replacing a hard drive with another hard drive in the SAME computer (the only thing being changed is the hard drive).

If you wanted to go to all the trouble of using sysprep or universal restore then you might get it to work, but it's more trouble than it's worth in my opinion.

 

I have done it a few times without any real problem. However the difficulty you can get is if the source machine's drivers are incompatible with the destination machine's hardware, you could experience problems rebooting.

Normally if you can get the machine to the point where it boots it tends to sort any driver anomolies out itself - or at least will ask you for them.

If you cannot get it to boot what you have to try is booting from the XP installation disk and part way through the install you will be offered the ability to "Press R to repair an existing installation". This will generally get you sorted to the point where you can boot up.

So in summary, it is definitely doable, but not guaranteed. Worth a go though.

Edit : Note that I am assuming that you will no longer be running the source machine - if you try to run both on the same license you will not only be breaking the EULA, you will quite possibly get caught out by the Genuine Advantage piracy tool.

F.

 

Thanks guys. I got enough info. I had suspected such issues. Now I have to decide whether its worth it. I'm not too busy this afternoon, so here I go...

 

I tried it out of curiosity and it booted in the other machine, but I couldn't get past the login without revalidating either online or by telephone. I am hearing inklings that XP drops a serial number on the Motherboard, I don't know if this is true or not.

 

Ordinary XP Activation keeps track of the hardware. You can get away with changing one or two things, but once significant changes are noticed you need to register for reactivation. I read somewhere that the NIC carries a weighting of four points - meaning that MS really start to get suspicious if all of a sudden you have a different network card.

Note there is nothing wrong with moving your OS to another platform. the Activation Code is MS's way of trying to ensure that you only run one license on one machine - which is reasonable.

F.

 

I can confirm that the NIC carries extra weight with Windows. I removed mine to make room for a PCI ethernet connection.
I was immediately asked to re-activate Windows and was given the choice of telephone or electronically. I said yes to the latter and within seconds got a message that all was OK. Previously over time I had added memory, changed a CD drive, a DVD player and I swap hard drives on a daily basis all without query.

Xpilot