Migrate XP to XP

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My dad wants to transfer his XP to another computer (both are older computers) with all his programs settings ect. He needs to know what the best way to do that is. I know there are programs out there that do this and are great however my searches on here have been unsuccessful. Unfortunately there’s too many XP to 7 threads and I’m having trouble wading through them all to find a good old fashion XP migration tool. So any suggestions (Free is best). Would be nice if could select which programs to transfer.

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Any 3rd party Imaging app should be able to successfully Clone the HD to a different PC. The OS would have to be deleted from the old PC after the Clone to satisfy the EULA. Check Imaging threads in the Security and Backups forum.

I personally would create an Image of the old PC. Download any necessary drivers of new PC to a flash drive. Then restore the Image to the new PC. Windows should load generic drivers on the new PC. You should then be able to install the aforementioned drivers.

This will however take any problems or errors from the old PC and place them on the new PC. If he wants to move to the new PC because of some errors or problems, he may be creating bigger problems by making this change.

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Any 3rd party Imaging app should be able to successfully Clone the HD to a different PC. The OS would have to be deleted from the old PC after the Clone to satisfy the EULA. Check Imaging threads in the Security and Backups forum.

He will actually be reformatting the same drive anyway but I’ve seen and heard of major problems when simply transferring an HDD to another computer since the drivers are different. Typically XP will figure it out and start using the right drivers but it will also have a ton of extra useless drivers that can interfere with the new machines operation. It’s for that reason that Migration programs exist.

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How old of a computer? Still use IDE or not. If IDE or the BIOS is set to emulation mode so a SATA drive appears as a IDE drive, and you’re a geek, its easy to do for free. You would image, clone or transfer the drive to the system you want it on, try booting. If it does you can proceed to install the hardware drivers for that system (I’ve never had a problem with so called left over drivers from an old system, so far in about a dozen goes).
If it does not boot you can use the UBCD4Win boot CD (requires XP disc to build) to replace the IDE controller with a compatible one (Fix HDC is the utility I think). It will then boot and you can install the rest of the drivers for that system. Most likely there will be enough hardware changes to require reactivation…so have a good story ready if its an OEM, like the mobo was replaced.
For the non-geeks and if moving from SATA to SATA or IDE to SATA, there are the migration tools alluded to already and also bare metal image restoration to dissimilar hardware and those all require some monetary exchange.
There’s also system virtualization with Paragon’s GoVirtual program but then we’re back to geek again and depending on the programs (games mainly), everything may not run as desired, and it will not be particularly fast on an older system, but again you can run XP in VM on a free install of LINUX, say Ubuntu as host…like I said, pretty geeky, and it bypasses all the hardware interaction.

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My dad wants to transfer his XP to another computer (both are older computers) with all his programs settings ect. He needs to know what the best way to do that is..

“gr”
The simplest way would be to…
1. Image the “Newest XP OS” (the one you want) and place it on an “external”. Macrium Reflect or EASEUS TODO, etc. (both free)

2. Do the same for the “Old XP”….. just …because.

3. Load up your Macrium EASEUS recovery disk (On the “Box” you want) and install the image of the newer XP to it … done.

You should your have your KEY (both) handy ..just in case, or you might have to call “MS”… probably not though…worth a shot:cheers:Regards Fred

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Your not providing enough information here to help properly

What operating system is/was installed on the computer he intends to use?
Are both these computers OEM types?
Do you have a genuine XP install disk, or an OEM disk?

Replacing the HDD from the current computer to the intended use one will yield nothing but issues, as will cloning, or any type of imaging. Bad idea.
…and that’s not even mentioning problems with os activation.

You’ll want to set up the computer you intending to use with a fresh clean XP installation then use XP file and transfer settings to migrate data over from the
one he has all his data on. This will be limited to user data and some settings.
For programs…LapLink’s PC-Mover(There will probably be no freeware that will accomplish this).

Download and burn a copy of all your needed drivers to disk, as well as any service packs so they will be ready when needed.
You are not going to get everything transfered over easily. Your personal settings may require manually reloading/reconfiguring.

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Cloning the disk and installing the image on the new PC will work in many cases but if the hardware is different enough, you may not be able to boot on the new PC. At a minimum, you will have to install new device drivers for the hardware that is different.

Easy Transfer is meant for use in migrating from XP to Windows 7. I’m not sure it will work for migrating between two XP computers.

Jerry

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Laplink has a set of apps, under the Laplink PC Mover family, that will allow you do to what you want. I used one of them when migrating from XP 32 bits to 7 64 bits and it worked pretty well. Had an issue with Adobe Acrobat, but that was it. Everything else went fine.

Now they have many apps, back then was only the Windows 7 upgrade assistant, so the hardest part may be the determination of what app to choose.

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I actually ended up doing the transfer myself the old fashioned way (Did a full backup of the machine, reformatted the drive, reinstalled Windows, Moved the files back to the original drive, redid all the settings except Firefox and Chrome in which I copied the original appdata folders to make it quicker and easier). My point in creating this thread was to find a program that simply saves the Documents and Settings then successfully transfers them to a new machine. The problem with doing it the way I did is that any settings stored in the registry had to be restored manually rather than a quick and easy fix. That’s also why I didn’t ask for a cloning software nor did I mention OEM or not. The title of the thread is XP to XP so I figured that obviously meant he was transferring to another XP machine. I didn’t think to mention the Disk because I figured it was an easy assumption (He did have a key and I downloaded/burned a new copy of the OS for him) as I was asking specifically for a transfer program. I know XP actually has it’s own transfer tool but I wasn’t sure how good that was either.

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I actually ended up doing the transfer myself the old fashioned way

TBH that’s what I would’ve done – you know it’s right then. Incidentally, the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard that you mentioned works quite well.

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