I touched on this subject briefly in another dead thread, but am I the only one that shares the desire to upgrade someone's entire computer leaving everything intact -- Down to the location of their iTunes desktop icon position?

I've tried to utilize sysprep to my advantage a couple of times, but I don't fully understand its potential and never have the time to sit down and get it set up.

What do you guys think the pitfalls in cloning the old hard drive to the new with your favorite imaging software and immediately booting to XP's repair mode would be? Assuming it's not a 8 year old SP1 install or any cross platform nonsense.

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I know Microsoft purchased Alohabob a while back just to let it die. (or is that basically what we're using in Vista/Win7 Easy Transfer?) And I haven't looked at LapLink's product much, but all of those seem too consumer based and not as quick and painless as above.

Rather than the immediate repair, should I just be using sysprep to remove all drivers and such beforehand? Basically I don't want to hunt down difficult proprietary software, just to go through registration and configurations all over again if I can clone/repair in 1 hour.

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A) I share your concerns and too have contemplated this scenario
B) I do this all the time and rarely see any downside.
C) Christ dude, you're fucking ignorant and should be ashamed to consider yourself IT
D) tl;dr

10/15/2009 2:22:16 PM

the only time i've used sysprep was to clone a win7 VM to remove the machine name, product id, etc. worked pretty well and pretty straightforward once i read the procedure documentation. otherwise, all the settings and application installations worked just fine in the cloned OS

[Edited on October 15, 2009 at 2:26 PM. Reason : .]

10/15/2009 2:25:46 PM

i've never used sysprep by itself, but assume it would work fine after getting past the learning curve.
http://samplecode.rockwellautomation.com/idc/groups/literature/documents/wp/6000-wp005_-en-p.pdf
http://www.linglom.com/2008/12/22/clone-microsoft-windows-xp-using-sysprep-and-norton-ghost-part-i-introduction/

i've used a program called UIU (sysprep + driver cache + ?) which works great. they have free trials...http://www.uiu4you.com/uiu_description.html

10/15/2009 3:52:33 PM

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx

10/15/2009 5:17:42 PM

doesn't that just virtualize it (P to V)? i must have missed the part about going from V to P.

10/15/2009 6:31:04 PM

SysPrep has its advantages if your hardware is almost the same across your department / division, and/or, you have a dedicated resource to figure out how to use it. In a practical use, I used it to provision close to 100 machines with damn tight security on each and every one of them. Cut down time to do so (and rate of errors if had to do manually) from 8 hours per machine to 2 hours per machine. Longest part of the whole process was the image itself copying. Hardware itself is iffy, as if your HAL changes, you need to get Sysprep to recognize it. Somebody posted a link in another thread to UUIU (http://www.uiu4you.com/uiu_description.html), which avoids a LOT of the hardware changing issues, for a price.

Given this is a single machine, it's not worth it. Copy the contents via Ghost / Acronis / whatever, try it out on the new machine. If it BSODs (and likely will) reinstall and repatch the OS. Your applications and application settings should still be preserved.

10/15/2009 7:58:44 PM

^ I've never user sysprep by itself, but according to those links i posted above it doesn't look too bad. And yeah I posted that UIU link above too. Nice to see someone realize what it is...usually when I post it nobody knows what I'm talking about

If anybody wants to test UIU they have a free trial, and there seems to be an ISO on TPB as well, fwiw.

Good idea about the brute method, never thought of that.

10/15/2009 8:07:21 PM

UIU looks pretty nice. I'm gonna give it a try.

^^I mean it's more than one machine but rarely ever more than one at any given time. I know it works, because I've done it in the past -- I was just looking for a better solution.

10/16/2009 9:36:50 AM

with p2v, you have a full system clone in a bootable and portable format. with this you can add in drivers for your new hardware, patch it, and ghost it into your new hardware. you also have a backup

10/16/2009 10:16:07 AM

lol, i'm getting over 1MB/sec download rates on that torrent too. awesome

10/17/2009 2:01:57 PM

^^ how can you add drivers for hardware that doesn't exist?

10/17/2009 3:06:14 PM

^ just download the driver packages, and make 'em available somewhere that sysprep knows about like a network share or a drivers directory.

10/17/2009 4:05:17 PM