by LoneWolf on Thu Oct 21, 2004 12:58 pm
Believe it or not, I have a way to do this that will work well. Well as in, as well as your system is running now (if it's running like crap, that's what you'll get). We had quite a few situations back in the day where no matter what recommendation we made, a customer didn't want a system reloaded, or they'd lost all their software through carelessness, or they had wierd quirky configs that would be a cast iron pain to set back up. Here's how to do this.
DISCLAIMER: If you bork your box, I am not in ANY way responsible.
For starters, you must boot your system in Safe Mode. I would do this before you move the drive to the new system; reason being that it is easy to forget to do this, and if you forget and boot normally, it will be tough to get this right again. In Safe Mode, go to Device Manager. From there, delete EVERY device from every category. This will take some time, since you have to go one at a time; If Windows prompts you to reboot to complete changes, tell it No, and keep going. When you are done, you should just have a computer with no devices. Shut the computer down.
Migrate the hard disk. Boot in normal mode. The computer will come up in an almost safe-like mode due to having no hardware, and no recognized BIOS in the Device Manager. Run the Add Hardware Wizard, and manually add the ACPI BIOS from the System Devices category. Your system will begin detecting devices one by one once this is added, so make sure you have all the necessary drivers available on hand. Once all devices have been added, you will be all set.
Note, sometimes it's better if you don't have a very clean install, to start from scratch. If you have years of traces of uninstalled programs in your registry and things like that, reinstallation will probably speed things up. But, this method has worked for me time and time again.
Intel Q9450 @3.2GHz, Gigabyte GA EP45-UD3P, 4 x 2GB G.Skill @4-4-4-12
Antec P160SW case (modded), Xigmatek 750w PSU
3x 500GB (RAID-5), , OptiArc 7200S, ASUS E818A3T
Creative X-Fi XtremeGamer, Hauppauge HVR-1800, Radeon 4890
Dell 2407WFP