I spent most of the weekend migrating the contents of my old PC’s hard drive to a brand new one I bought last week. Another Western Digital 320GB, same model as the one I have in the new PC with Vista on.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous entry, I once again used the fantastic Acronis MigrateEasy to transfer everything over – that part was painless. The next bit wasn’t so much painless as a pain in the backside!

Moving Windows from one set of hardware to a completely different set is not a simple task. Once I’d completed the migration, I moved the new drive into the new PC and turned it on. I booted off the XP CD and ran a repair installation. It came up with a few errors saying it couldn’t find files on the disc – only way I could get past them was to ignore them. I was hoping it wouldn’t completely break everything if it couldn’t find them. Luckily it didn’t seem to screw things up too much, I’m guessing it was trying to find the latest versions of the files which were newer than on the disc – such as iexplore.exe – when Setup had completed, XP had been reverted back to using IE6 instead of IE7.

I had to reinstall all the updates since SP2 was released, which is about 85, and for some reason msconfig.exe had disappeared entirely, copied that over from another system. I haven’t come across any other system files which are missing yet. I’ve had to reinstall a few programs such as Nero Burning ROM and Adobe Acrobat, either due to their activation systems or because the installation has been corrupted by the repair/migration… but all in all it went well.

One of the first things I did after getting back into Windows was try to uninstall the old motherboard drivers, this caused a blue-screen immediately so I didn’t do that again! I rebooted and straight away installed my new motherboard drivers off the CD it came with and left the old ones alone. Updated the graphics card drivers to the latest NVIDIA release too.

I did have a problem with my Logitech mouse drivers, but I managed to fix that by renaming a driver file before reinstalling them, something to do with WDF? Not entirely sure why there was a problem but thankfully SetPoint is now working 100%.

I’m quite amazed that XP is actually working well on new hardware, and definitely running faster than it was – which should be expected considering how much better the new hardware is compared to what it was.

I guess my next step should be to backup the C: drive, just in case something goes seriously wrong. I installed that copy of Windows all the way back in October 2004. It has since been moved from the original 120GB (PATA) to a 320GB drive (PATA) in the same PC, then been moved from that drive to another 320GB drive (SATA) and moved to completely new hardware. So there is every chance that it will end up corrupt somehow, and it would be absolutely terrible if I lost data. I have still got the 320GB PATA drive from the old PC with everything intact so I will have a complete copy of everything before I migrated, but I would like a backup of how it is NOW.

I was really surprised just how noisy the old PC was compared to my new one when I hooked it back up and started the migration. I was also surprised to find that both of the fans fitted to the front of the case seem to have died, they weren’t even that old! So most of the noise was being generated by the remaining 3 fans. I was so glad when the migration task was done and I could change back to the new PC… and have some peace and quiet! I can’t believe I put up with it for so long!!