Pulling My Hair Out

Please, please can someone help me. I have very recently bought and downloaded a copy of Acronis True Image 8. For the past two days I have had this program driving me mad. I am not new to computing as I consider myself fairly (maybe very) computer literate after 15 years working with them. But never ever in my life has a program ever made me feel so frustrated as this one has.
All I want to do is so simple, and that is to make an exact copy of every single item on my laptop (30gb) and then put it on my desktop pc (60gb) and then reboot the desktop pc and be able to use it exactly as I do with my laptop.
I have dedicated an empty external hardrive (40gb) for this purpose, but no way can I do it or find out how to do it. I have tried "Disk Clone" on to the external hardrive and then with the aid of Acronis boot disk put the clone on my desktop pc, but it does not work. I have even tried "Create Image" but to no avail. This looks like a very good program to me, and I would love to use it how it is advertised. So it is either something I am doing wrong or not doing right.
I have tried the Help file and although it tells me every single thing that I would want to know about this program, it does not tell me how to do it. At least not what I want to do and step by step. Can someone please tell me how to do this as I am running out of hair. Regards Foxy 11

 

I am sorry that those html marks were there but I certainly did not put them there and I do not know how they got there. If you would like to check, you will see my comment when I edited them out myself. Regards Foxy11

 

Are you saying that you have a laptop, and you want to make an image of this laptop, and then restore the image to a desktop PC? Then have the desktop system function just like your laptop? If I am reading you correctly, and this is the case, how do you expect that to work? The laptop and the desktop I assume have totally different hardware, like motherboard, hard drive, CDRW drive, graphics card, etc. Imaging software like TI, is for making an exact image of a certain system, and then re-storing to that system at a later time. For example, your laptop has an ATI graphics card, and your desktop has an nVidia, right there is a majpr problem with what you are wanting to accomplish. If I read your post wrong, then dis-regard what I said!

Tipton

 

You would be better off installing the same programs on the PC as the laptop and transferring any data you need over. The person who gave the previous reply was correct. The hardware is different so restoring the laptop image to the PC would not work. You could however transfer the image to the PC and then reinstall Windows but you would probably find other programs needed to be reinstalled as well so it makes more sense to just install the same programs on the PC as the laptop.

 

My understanding of Disk clone was that its prime use was targeted at allowing a computer to change its hard disk. What you are trying to do is closer to allowing a hard disk to change its computer.

Good luck.

 

try Digital Dolly: www.download.com

 

Thank you all very much for your replies and advice. But believe you me, before I bought this program I done a little research on it. I also sent two email's to the program's technical support team and this is a copy of the 2nd one and a copy of their reply
"I am interested in your above product. So please can you give me some information. All I want to do is to make an exact copy of my computer system including programs that I may have on it, emails and email settings. In fact every single item that is on my computer. And then would I be able to put it onto a completly empty hard drive on my other computer and then use every single item that is on it? I live in England am I am using XP Home Edition. Thank you"
"Thank you for interest in Acronis True Image 8.0
Acronis True Image 8.0 supports Windows XP and disk cloning, so you will be able to clone you old hard drive to the new one, cloning every single item, mail and so on. You will get a exact copy of your drive after cloning. Acronis True Image 8.0 is a best solution to solve your task".

Before anyone points out that the reply does not mention another computer, my question does. So going by this reply I bought the program and fully expected it to do what I have mentioned and I still do expect it. I was hoping that technical support would have picked up on this posting by now as I have also sent them another email about this problem. Once again thank you all very much for your replies. Foxy11

 

In reply to Tipton. I thank you for your comments and of course you are perfectly right what you say. There is bound to be a clash with different components. But initially I was trying to clone and after getting that reply in answer to my question from technical support I expected it to work and thought that maybe there was something in the program that would compensate for any clash. Foxy11

 

Hi, foxy11

No need to pullyour hair out,

You should be able to do what you want to do.

Ideally you should perform a clean install.

because your Hardware Abstraction Layer doesn't match your new hardware.

However, if you wish to try, a Repair install, which retains your installed applications and most of your user settings, should do the trick. A backup in advance of the following is a good idea, just in case something goes awry.

You will need to do a repair install. Follow these steps:

. Set your BIOS to have the CD drive as the first boot device.

. With your Windows XP CD in the drive, start the computer from the CD-ROM,

. When the computer starts from the CD, the system checks your hardware and then prompts you to select one of the following options:

To set up Windows XP now, press ENTER.
To repair a Windows XP installation using Recovery Console, press R.
To quit Setup without installing Windows XP, press F3.


Press ENTER.


. Press F8 to accept the Licensing Agreement.

. A box lists your current Windows XP installation, and then the system prompts you to select one of the following options:

To repair the selected Windows XP installation, press R.
To continue installing a fresh copy of Windows XP without repairing, press ESC.


Press R to start the automatic repair process.


. Have your Product Key at hand as you'll need to reenter it during the repair.

. After repairing Windows XP, set your BIOS back to have the hard drive as the first boot device.

. You'll have to re-activate Windows.

. You will need to re-download all updates, starting with SP1 - these are all wiped clean by the Repair.

Take Care,
TheQuest

 

Perahps I am misunderstanding your intentions, but if what you are copying include Windows XP, then what you are trying to do sounds like you want to have two different PCs running with the same copy (same license) of a Micorsoft operating system. Bill Gates would probably call that piracy. The same comment applies to most other retail software.

However, if your intent is to (1) make a copy, then immediately (2) do a "repair" installation with a second copy of XP, that would be fair, since in the end you would have two computers running XP, when you own two licenses. Something similar can be said about other software, if you have a second license. And, of course, some software permits multiple installations, such as at work and at home. Read the licenses to be sure.

As others have mentioned, a "repair" of XP is required when changing hardware, especially motherboards. You will need a retail copy of the XP CD to do a repair. In general, an OEM copy, which is cheaper, will not support a repair, only a clean install.

The odds are good that you will have to re-activate XP after the installation, but that should be no problems, assuming that you have a second license. Note that some other software has activation-like protection, although with a different method than is used by Microsoft. Norton products come to mind, as do legally-downloaded-Napster songs.

 

Hello all,

Thank you for using Acronis True Image (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/).

We recommend you to use Microsoft Sysprep tool in order to migrate your system to different hardware. Please see the following: http://www.acronis.com/products/trueimage/faq.html#17

Thank you.