use bartpe made for xp in win 7 32

I have built a bart pe with xp that I have used successfully for years with that operating system. I use it to boot the system in order to load images with Drive Image XML that I have stored elsewhere.

I have a new computer with win 7 32bit op system.

My question is can I use this disk as it is for the same purpose with win 7?

I have loaded the bartpe and it starts up and sees my drives. But I want to be sure so that I don't end up doing a reformat only to find that the image won't work.

Does anyone have any knowledge of this?

 

BartPE is a separate and distinct OS from anything you have on an internal Hard Disk. You may use it and its (and your) tools to do as you had before. The tools are running UNDER BartPE, not the installed OS. You may use image restoration tools under BartPE to image or restore your Win7 partition if you wish, you just need to know whether those tools can handle things like System Reserved Partitions which bare W7 systems will probably have generated if they were built from scratch.

 

Why would you reformat? Before doing anything else, I would create some backup images using the existing boot medium, to check that it works in these operations.

 

I see on their web site that they make a drive image XML that works with win 7. I don't know if the older copy of drive image on my bartpe will work with the new one I would install on my computer. I guess I am trying to not have to make a new bartpe if I can help it, because I made it years ago, and don't remember how I did it.

I have always reformatted before I reloaded an image because I followed some steps I found on the web. Now that you mentioned it, I guess it might not be necessary to reformat, but I could just replace the current setup with the image directly. That way if the image should fail for some reason I would still have my original setup.

One thing that scares me is in the past I also made a UBCD at the same time I made the bart. But one time when I tried to use the drive image on the UBCD to load an image I made, for some reason I never understood it wouldn't work, even though it was the same version of the software. It would go through the process of restoring the image but right at the end it gave a message which I don't remember and wouldn't load it. I ended up having to use the bartpe.

Drive image is a very small program and I have never had a problem with it so I was thinking about trying to continuing to use it.

Right now I can't experiment because I don't have a flash drive big enough to load an image for win7.

My other option may be to get an external hard drive instead of using flash as I do now, and simply using the built in win 7 software with out compression.

Do you have any opinion on whether these portable external drives are reliable?

Thanks for the responses - I'm not as computer savvy as some of you obviously are, but unfortunately know enough to get myself in trouble at times.

 

Once you start a restore image operation, all the information in the partition is lost. If the restore fails, the information that was in the partition before the restore won´t be available at all.

They are as reliable as your internal disk. But keep in mind that your existing boot disk may not recognize a new external drive.