Clone WinXP to MBP...

[ZballZ]

Is there any way it's possible to simply CLONE my PC WINXP partition to my MBP? Or do I have to do a complete reinstall of WinXP?

I am asking because I dont have the original WinXP install CDs, ONLY the recovery CDs which came with my Acer Laptop - and they will only run on that particular PC. (Wouldnt wanna buy XP again!! )

AND; A have a perfect Clone Image of my XP-drive with all my applications set up, which I know works! (and often restore this image, when XP starts behaving all f.... up!)

So, can I simply move this image - from and external HD - to a partition on my (brand new ) C2-MBP - and then be able to run both Tiger and XP?

 

[SiliconAddict]

Small fact about Windows; turn over your laptop see the pretty hologram with the windows logo and product code on it? That is your license. With that it doesn't matter where you get your media from. As long as you have that license MS doesn't care if you downloaded XP from bittorrent, borrowed it from a friend, or simply purchased a new license. The only issue you MAY run across if you download it from bittorrent is that that product code may not be in the on CD list. It depends on what kind of arrangements the OEM made with MS. If it’s an OEM product # you probably are screwed. If not you may be able to D\L the media off BT and it may just work. As for imaging the drive. The official term is MAYBE. It depends on how Acer setup the image, if its using sysprep to do a minisetup and if the HAL (hardware extraction layer.) drivers that are in the image is compatible with bootcamp. My gut instinct says that it probably wouldn’t work but that is a guess. Is the warrantee up on your acer? I ask because if its like Dell if you call them up and tell them you tried reinstalling Windows with the provided disk or on hard drive disk image and it didn’t work you MAY be able to con them into sending you a legit Win XP CD. On thing to keep in mind about that though. More and more often now OEM’s have a bit of code to check the serial number of your system to verify that its X OEM’s hardware before installing Windows. Dell started doing this a few years back. (Probably because MS was pissed at how many Dell Windows XP OEM CD’s were floating out there in the land of pirates. So even if they do send you a shiny new XP CD it may not work in your Mac laptop.
There are a lot of maybes unfortunately that’s the best I can do for you.

 

[ZballZ]

thx.
Im actually not using any Acer-backup-software - im using TrueImage - which probably wont run in OSX anyway. But I was actually thinking of copying MY WHOLE XP PARTITION (uncompressed as raw files) to an external drive, and then copying onto the appropriate MBP partition...

I guess the file copying wont be a problem, but whether the partition would be recognized as bootable is the issues i guess...!?