Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
One very good reason to want to restore the OS is to move to another drive in the computer.
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Restoring an image of Windows to a new drive that is the same size or larger is generally an easy task. But you have to restore it to the SAME partition for things to go easily. Say your original Windows was installed on the first partition of a drive, now you are replacing that with a same or larger drive but you want to restore Windows to the second partition. Some backup/restore programs are smart enough to automatically make the tweaks needed. But most are not. Or at least they were not back in the Windows 2000 days. I did such a restore once and of course it did not work even though the backup software said it would. I had to do a lot of research and some low level manual editing at raw disk level to make it work. I did that restore - once - to see if I could. I succeeded. But it was difficult even for a computer guru, which I was at the time. You've got to really learn the low level Windows boot process, much lower level than many people want to dive.
Things may be different now. As I said, this was back in the (I think) Windows 2000 days. That was the time when I finally abandoned Windows for good. I had been a Unix geek pretty much from the very beginning of Unix. And I started using Linux when that came pout too. But back in those days I still held onto Windows computers and was not 100% *nix. Now I am 100% *nix, and have been for two+ decades. Nowadays I just pull a complete HDD out of a Linux box and plug it into a different computer with completely different hardware and it boots just fine. Try that with Windows! Ha!
Anyway, I'm not really trying to bash Windows. If people want to use it, that's fine. I was originally just trying to point out things that can really screw the pooch when you backup/restore Windows to non identical computers. Like when your old computer burned itself up and you had to buy a new one. Beware. Even a clean backup without any corruption may not work for some of the reasons I mentioned above. That's why image backups of Windows should NOT be your only backups. There's a pretty good chance that your image backup will be worthless when you really need it. You need to have file-based backups as well. With file-based backups you will have to re-install the Windows OS from scratch, then copy over all your important files from the backup. With an image backup, you are attempting to restore everything in one fell swoop - your files AND the operating system. And that's when you often find out how screwed you are. You better have a file-based backup to recover from your failed recovery attempt with an image backup. It's not so much of an issue restoring to an identical computer. But many times you are not doing that.