Use of old Laptop HDD with new Laptop

Doublespresso

Sorry for not being clear:

I have decided to stick to the XP Home edition on the new machine, but I also wanted to continue to use the old HDD with all the applications etc in the same way as I did before, therefore I was wondering if I can do a dual boot and boot from the old HDD when needed.

I am relatively good with techie/PC things.

S0litaire

If you want to use the OLD hdd in the new laptop then it's NOT a good ideas! it will be a total mess!

How big is the old drive and how big is the new one?

If the old one is a lot smaller then best thing to do is set up a virtual machine.

Stick the old drive in the old laptop and make a windows Backup of the whole drive to an external USB

Install windows Virtual machine in the new laptop and install a basic XP install.

Then in that virtual machine run the backup software and restore the backup you made of your old laptop to the new virtual machine.

It might take a bit of fiddling about but you'll then have a working copy of you old laptop and data you can use on your new laptop.
You then can just wipe the old drive and reinstall XP and sell the laptop.

That way you'll have your new laptop and OS AND your old Laptops data and programs available at the same time. (you can map folders between the virtual and real desktops to share files...

almillar

That's quite clever S0litaire, OP can then carry their old PC inside their new one. I would imagine the License key would get !!!!!!ed up and the virtual Windows would complain about not being genuine.
Doublespresso - no. Booting off USB would likely be slow, and Windows XP really doesn't like doing it. I looked into carrying XP around on a USB stick but it's not worth the effort to get it to work. The best solution is the simplest - You've got XP installed on the old computer, just install your applications there too. I don't know how many you have, and whether you think you'll be saving time or money doing this, but in the long run, running your apps natively in 1 XP installation is the best solution. I really don't understand why you want to have a USB drive hanging off your laptop all the time?!

S0litaire

It would not bork the system! XP would just see it as a reinstall onto new hardware and ask to be authenticated again. (few seconds on the net or a 15min freephone to Microsoft and all's good.)

Since it's virtual once he's got everything he needs off of it, he can just delete the image.

Doublespresso

Thanks S0litaire, in fact what you propose is the kind of solution that I am looking for!
BTW the new HDD is 160GB and the old one is only 40GB.

Ideally it would have been like a 2nd user in windows so that when I login as that user I get my old lappy back.

in answer to almillar, I have had the old laptop for over 5 years now and I have accumulated lots of applications tweaks etc that I use, and it's al organised in exactly the way I want. Also a major problem is in transferring al the emails/folders/rules/settings etc from Outlook Express as these are not easy to back up especially when you have as many emails as I do, as dbx files become unstable if they are over 2GB! (I estimate that my emails occupy around a 1/3 of the old HDD)

In short, if I can find a suitable solution along the lines suggested by S0litaire it would be perfect... can you guide me as to how to do this?

S0litaire

Download Virtual PC:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloadS/details.aspx?FamilyID=04d26402-3199-48a3-afa2-2dc0b40a73b6&displaylang=en
Virtual PC Homepage:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/default.aspx

Microsoft Support Article
"How to create a Virtual PC hard disk image by using a backup disk image file:"
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/912826


Very rough instructions...

Bascially:
- Create a Restore CD (Or recovery disk) for your old laptop and make a full system backup.
- Create a blank Virtual PC image in the program.
- You can link the restore CD to be the boot drive of the virtual machine.
- It will boot up and start the recovery process.
- Once that's finished you can restore from your full system backup