Need advice on transfering data from desktop to laptop

Help, I really could use some advice to solve our problem.

We have a desktop that has a hard drive that is making some really loud noises now. However, this system is the one used by our accountant, and contains all of our books! Our new accountant has a laptop PC she would like to transfer everything to.

We purchased True Image to help us in accomplishing this. Was this a mistake? Can True Image not do this? Both computers have 40 Gig hard drives, and disk space is not an issue.

But how best is it to do the transfer? Our previous Accountant suddenly quit on us, and we have no idea where our original Accounting software disks are. He left things in a real mess. And even if we had everything, it would take forever to install and configure the software. Yet, we need to get it transfered to another computer ASAP.

Can I accomplish this with an image backup and restore using CD's? That is what I tried, and the laptop is now giving an error saying that the HAL.DLL file is missing or corrupt.

Would the Disk Clone feature be the better option to use? What special steps do I need to do, in order to move this data to a different computer?

Or do I need to instead buy a different type of product?

Please, can someone point me in the right direction?? We are a poor non-profit. 91% of our revenue goes to feed the hungry, house homeless people, and assist teenaged parents. We have little money to spend on our administrative costs.

Lance

 

I would first try to transfer everything on the desktop hd. to another desktop hard drive. These HDs are very cheap now. In fact on the retail shelves, you probably could not get one less than 80 gig. (about $40 or less). And to do this transfer, use your bootable True Image CD (which you have to make) to CLONE the hard drives. There are two options to do this. 1) You would have to install the new drive inside the computer. 2) You can get an external case to put the new drive in and Clone it while it is in the ext. case. But you will have to open the desktop case anyway to install the new drive. Therefore you might as well do option 1.

Once you get this done, and you are running off the new drive, it will give you some breathing space to put the software on to the laptop. The reason your image backup and restore is not working is most likely because you tried to put it on an entirely different system. Imaging is meant to go on essentially the same computer system - just dealing with different drives.

To run any software on a different system, most software requires that you install the software on that system for the software to run properly. After the software is installed, THEN you can copy the DATA files from another system to the new system (the laptop) and the software should see the data files and be able to access them.

To transfer the data files, you can either burn them to a cd if you have a cd burner on the desktop, OR if you know how to network the desktop and laptop you can transfer the data over the network. Yet another option, if the data files are less than 1-gig, you can use a USB thumb drive to move the data.

Hope someting here helps. Good Luck.

 

Thanks, what about an external hard drive??

Thanks for your thoughts. This has got me thinking. What about all of these external USB hard drives on the market? Could I not easily clone to an external drive, and then be able to use that with different computers? Except, the drive letters would then be different, and that would be a problem for the software install. Or maybe not?? I guess we would have to tinker with the Accounting software setup at that point.

Our current Accountant is actually a consultant, working for us until we hire a new Accountant. She really does want to get the data on this laptop, for her convenience. She has another job, and is doing our bookkeeping on the side. So she needs to be able to take the computer home with her some evenings and on weekends.

So if anyone can provide any advise on how to get the data onto a laptop, that still would be the best solution for us.

Certainly someone has run into this issue before. Is there not a way to get around the HAL.DLL problem?

Lance

 

Sure you can use an external USB drive to store the image of the desktop. BUT as stated previously the software may not work correctly if you restore the image to another computer.

If your temp. accountant is a consultant, she should be able to find the accounting software that you use. Or is the accounting software custom made for your company? If she can get the software - even if you have to buy it - then the only thing needed is the DATA from your desktop system.

BTW, what version of Windows is on the desktop, XP or Win98?

 

Hello Lance,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

First of all, please note that after you restored the image to the laptop all the data is on the laptop and the problem is in operating system. To recover the operating system you may need to do the Repair Installation of Windows as described in Microsoft article. This will not delete any data file you have and may help you to recover the system to the state you wish.

Please note that the link above describes the repair installation of Windows XP and you will need your Windows XP installation CD in order to perform it.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

You might want to give consideration to this shareware application called "FileSync 2.18"...

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22FileSync+2.18%22

While searching for a "Retail" application to sync a desktop and laptop, I found nothing viable... But this little "FileSync 2.18" application works quite well...

NOTE:: "2.18" is the important variable to be mindfull of, as there is another producer of a "FileSync" application which is quite useless...

Just define which folders you wish to exclude, and pay attention to what you are doing ensure that you are retrieving everything you need...

Hope this helps, as it is a late reply to this topic...

Take it easy, and have a good one...
"Rude Boy"