Windows Vista Complete PC screencast

re: Windows Vista Complete PC screencast

Joe — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 00:50:32 GMT

Can you really restore to another PC? I bought a new hard drive for my notebook near the end of last year and read that if the HDD size is different that Complete PC wouldn't work, so I went out and bought Acronis. Would be interested to know for future reference.

re: Windows Vista Complete PC screencast

Keith Combs — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 03:25:25 GMT

Yes, you can restore to a completely different PC. I just did it for fun. I backed up my Dell Latitude D820 with Complete PC and restored it to a HP 6910p. Completely different machines, chipsets, CPUs, video chips (ATI and NVIDIA), etc.

You can always restore to a drive that is of equal size or larger. Restore will fail to a smaller drive. If you restore to a larger drive, the restore will create a partition the size of the source backup. You can easily expand that after restore to fill the drive with one partition.

Keep in mind you can't restore a x64 backup to a machine incapable of running x64. For different machines, you might hit other issues you'll have to resolve manually. In my case, I would need to install the ATI Catalyst video drivers.

Acronis TruImage and Symantec Ghost are also great tools that are widely used. I actually prefer Ghost.

re: Windows Vista Complete PC screencast

Jordan — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:45:26 GMT

When restoring to a totally different PC using Ghost or TruImage will it still detect the proper HAL/chipset/etc ??

So this must be an inherent trait of the vista boot process rather than the CPC piece?

re: Windows Vista Complete PC screencast

Keith Combs — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 17:21:26 GMT

Yes, it primarily a result of Windows Vista's ability to handle the redetection needed.

I have not tested Windows Server 2008 and what differences it may have.

re: Windows Vista Complete PC screencast

Dave — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 13:07:21 GMT

Ooooh. Don't get me started on Complete PC backup. :-)

I had no problems doing the backup, it was the restore later on that caused me many hours of headaches.

- Backed up Vista Business x64 (OEM install with SP1 applied later on).

- Installed Server 2008 x64 from MSDN 32/64bit combo 2008 media

- Needed to roll back to Vista so I could go back to work on Monday, so inserted MSDN 32/64 combo VistaSP1 media. Nope. Can't repair this install (Server2008) with this media.

- Ok. Try to run repair from Server media. Same error message.

- Try Vista OEM media. Same error

- Format drive.

- Try combo Vista media since I wasn't sure if a non SP1 media could restore a SP1 install. Whoops, can't recover a 64bit image with a 32bit environment (the installer on the combo disc is obviously 32bit)

- Try OEM media. Yay! I can recover my partition.

It's a really cool idea, but not being able to get to the Restore PC without going through "Repair" is a little annoying (and confusing).

re: Windows Vista Complete PC screencast

LL — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 06:45:11 GMT

Is can I use WinPE for the restore of this VHD image? Or can I at least script this somehow?

re: Windows Vista Complete PC screencast

LL — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 06:45:13 GMT

Can I use WinPE for the restore of this VHD image? Or can I at least script this somehow?