Drive Cloner: can an image be restored from one operating system to a different one?

This may be a silly question, but will Drive Cloner restore an image to a different operating system, say from Vista to Windows 7? And if so, what happens to all the programs and settings (task bar icons, desktop icons, wallpaper etc) already on the different operating system—are they removed or do they coexist with the restored image?

I ask because this is likely to be the scenario if I do need to use a restored image. Most new PCs will have Windows 7 installed, and I use Vista.

 

I'm afraid not. Imaging programs work by saving the data blindly; meaning hat they do not know whether the data they are saving contains Vista, Windows 7, or, God forbid, ME. Data is data. You might be interested in other programs that "backup" data independent of the OS. But if you are planning on changing your OS you'll find that really the only thing to do is to build from scratch again. The registry is needed for most non-portable applications, so backup programs will do nothing but help prevent data loss during migration.

Sorry about that.

 

Thanks n8chavez.

So presumably it would work if the new operating sytem was the same as the one the image was made on?

In that case, what would happen to all the programs etc that came bundled with the new operating system. Would they be uninstalled by the new image overlay?

Sorry for these basic questions. I'm new to all this.

 

Correct, it would work if the OS is the same, but given that there are hardware differences you might have to reactivate it. The new destination drive's contents would be wiped out first and then the exact contents of the older drive, at the time that the image was created, would be reimaged onto the new drive.

No worries. Ask questions, it's the only way to learn.

 

orian, in addition to n8chavaz comments, I wanted to point out that though imaging software can help you migrate a certain OS from one PC to another, they can not migrate from one OS to another. No imaging software will be able to do this as it is not practical.

 

Thanks guys.

As an experiment, yesterday, I tried to use the Drive Cloner rescue CD on my own PC to restore an image made of it last month. When I got to the CD's console and followed the initial steps the wizard led me through, when it came to opening the plugged in USB exyernal hard drive to choose an image from it, there was no option in the CD's menu for that. It only mentioned something about opening a CD from the CD drive.

Also, in the left-hand explorer tree of the rescue CD, all it had were strangly named folders, nothing at all relating to the image files on my external USB drive.

So it was impossible for me to restore an image from my own PC to my PC. It's a good job I found out about this now.