Using Bart's PE Builder and the Ultimate Bootable CD for Windows
(http://www.ubcd4win.com/howto.htm) I prepared a bootable CD and included
the Windows backup program (NTBACKUP.EXE). Using the CD, I backed up my
wife's computer onto a USB drive, then restored it to a newly formatted
drive on the new computer. Last step was to run the XP install program from
the XP CD and perform a Repair - this last step makes the changes necessary
for the new hardware environment. For a change, everything went well with
very little additional tweaking needed. In less than an hour our my own time
(excluding the two-hour each for backup and restore which were done while I
was watching a video) the new computer was up and running. There were no
issues to be reported by my wife and she is thrilled with the speed of her
"new" computer - she went from a 400MHz P3 to a 1.7GHz P4.

I have used Ghost before and had it make an exact copy of one disk to
transfer onto a disk on another networked computer. There may be other modes
of operation for Ghost, but that is the only way I used it. Doing so
required that the destination computer was almost identical hardware to the
source. This worked well in my situation since it was a computer lab that
needed duplicate machines. It would probably work ok for the situation I had
in transferring my wife's info onto the new computer - would have also
needed to run XP install just as I actually did do. The main difference in
using XP backup is that I now have a backup of her files on an external USB
drive in case anything crashes.

Hope this helps others in this situation. The bootable XP utility disk is
not hard to make once you look at the step-by-step instructions on the
ubcd4win site (link above). I did have to manually add the NTBACKUP.EXE file
to the Applications directory of the utility disk, though.

Peter
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-----Original Message-----
If the hardware on the new machine is different from the hardware on the
machine from which the XP Backup was made, won't this cause problems
(drivers & such)?  I've never used XP Backup - does it work like Ghost and
copy every file on partition C? - what is the difference between them?
Please pardon my ignorance, but where is the BIOS stored?

AnnaSummers

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