A friend of mine bought a new laptop that had Vista installed on it. Being the adventures type I installed it on my WHS and backed up the fresh load of Vista and promptly formatted the hard drive and installed Windows 7 RC on it.
While that isn’t all that exciting and nothing new for users of Windows Home Server. And since my friend digs Windows 7 and has no desire to load Vista back on his new laptop I now have a image of a Vista sitting on my WHS doing nothing. I’ll save it just because it is my friends bought and paid for OS but what am I going to do with this pretty much worthless image?
Then I got the wild idea to see if I could restore that image on a spare hard drive I had laying around and see if I could get it to boot on my hardware. I’ve read of people using a different machine to restore a image on a spare drive and then taking that drive and installing it in the machine the image was made for. But I never read of anyone trying to boot that image to a different system. So what the hell, I’ve got nothing better to do on a rainy Saturday afternoon. After all riding in the rain isn’t my idea of a fun thing to do just for kicks.
So I whip out my Restore USB thumb drive and boot my PC on it. By the way putting the Restore CD on a bootable USB thumb drive is the way to go. Not only is does it work much faster but you can include all of the extra drivers you might need for your NIC card and or hard driver controller like I need to do when I do a restore.
So how did it go? Well the image restored to the spare drive just fine. I boot that drive and I see “Starting Windows” and I get excited. Then boom BSOD. Disappointing to say the least. During the time the BSOD was displayed I notice it saying something about maybe hard drive drivers or something. Knowing how I have my hardware setup I go into the BIOS and change the SATA controller to IDE mode and try again. Tada it booted but as you can imagine my hardware is vastly different then the hardware of my friends laptop. I run Windows Update and before you know it all of my hardware drivers are loaded. Reboot, change the BIOS back and try again. Sure enough it boots this time and does some more updates. Before long this install of Vista is running like a charm. A quick WHS backup of this setup and now I have an image of my hardware saved. Now I can reload this image either on my hardware or my buddies laptop and both will boot perfect. Is WHS kick ass or what?
I did this for nothing else then to see if I could do it and make it work. I have no plans to ever use this install of Vista for a couple of reasons. First it is my friends OS he paid for so I have no rights to use it. Second Windows 7 just rocks! So really what purpose does this serve. Just think what would happen if your PC died or worse was stolen or you just want a new one. You build or buy a new one, restore your last backup and you are back in business in no time. Will this work every time? I have no idea but I bet it will more times then it won’t. I helped my friend update his laptop to the retail version of Windows 7 this past week. The last thing I did before we nuked his hard drive and installed 7 was run one last backup to my WHS. Can you see what I’m going to be doing next? Yup, I’m going to see if I can restore that backup and get it to boot too. Anyone want to take bets on if it will work or not? Got a spare hard drive laying around and nothing to do on a rainy Saturday afternoon? Why not give this a shot and see if will work for you too.
fasthair
Yup. 🙂
Vista and WIn7 are "hardware independant", which just means it doesn't lock down to a specific configuration. I'm sure this won't work in *every* circumstance, but definitely in most.
As for "using" that copy of vista, It should need to be reactivated due to significant hardware change. Or at least, when I've done this, it has. (notebook to desktop PC)
HI Drashna,
I guess if anyone else was going to try this it would be you! As I said I was really just bored and the idea popped in my head so I gave it a shot and it worked. I can see how Windows would throw a fit and want to be reactivated but it shouldn't be a big deal. At the most it would take is to call Microsoft to explain the deal and I'm sure they would activate it again. Good point though thanks for bring it up. I never thought about it since I never planned to use this restored image.
fasthair