copying hard drive to laptop

[jaylee11]

I have a friend that needs a spare computer, as a backup. He has decided that he is going to buy a laptop. If I can, how is the best way to copy his harddrive from his desktop to the laptop. I need to use this as the operating system because he has some profesional programs that he cant afford to lose. He is using win98 on his desktop. Can I burn a hard drive image using ghost or some other software and use it "restore" the hard drive on the laptop? If so when it boots up will it just think that we changed the hardware and update for it? Any and all help will be appreciated.

 

[Woodchuck2000]

Ghost or Imagecast are probably your best bets. The only problem is going to be space - the chances are the image wont fit onto a single CD. That said, I think (Although dont quote me) recent versions of ghost allow spanning over multiple CDs.

The image once transferred aught to simply detect the changes, and start working again.

 

[calpha]

Well,

I've done that before and got hung out to dry. I had a perfectly good Windoze 98se running on a PC, and used a network boot disk to image the entire hard drive over the LAN to my Lappy: I had already created a second partition on my lappy, and imaged the entire thing to it. Then using FDisk I changed my active partition and rebooted the lappy. I never could get 98 to load. Not even in safe mode. Just kept hanging.

I was going from a k6 pc to a k6 lappy (ComCrap).

That being said, as long as his machine has a CDRW in it, (IDE) you'll be fine with GHOST. It allows spanning of CDs (as of Ghost 2001, the last one I used). With USB External CDRWs, and SCSI CDRWs you may run into a driver problem.

Good luck.