I get kit donated to me now and again. Recently it was the pair of servers from Martin at work. They both had bits missing and so far I’ve managed to sell some of the bits and buy others to get one good dual-processor box running. It needs a disk and a clean Windows build but it looks promising as a possible replacemnt for Pixie. The other box however doesn’t have any processors. And it needs a pair of Athlon MP parts.
After eBaying some stuff, I’ve decided that rather than continue to bid like crazy for every Athlon MP processor pair that arrives (circa £200), I’m going to instead upgrade my main home PC and transplant my current parts into one of the cases that the MP boards arrived in.
The other thing I’ve done (because I’m mad like that) was to buy a bigger hard disk. The current 80GB was fine until we started bulk loading our CD collection into itunes. Now we are running a bit low. The question is though, how do you move Vista onto a new disk.
The easy option is Acronis Disk Director which will copy he paritions and resize on-the-fly. It takes about 15hours but that’s fine. I left it overnight. In the morning, I made the new disk the primary master and restarted. Didn’t work.
It appears that Acronis still don’t know how to crack the Vista file-system. So I’m not tempted to shell out again for Migrate Easy even though the product description states exactly what I’m trying ot do.
Vista comes with a feature called “Windows easy transfer” but that assumes you’ve performed a clean install and installed all your apps before running it. Which kind of makes the utility a bit marginal.
I’ve now performed a clean install onto the new disk and am running a backup job under the smaller disk, dumping into a file on the new one. The plan is to restore from that folder after booting back as the new disk. I have no idea if this will work but I really can’t suffer having to reinstall all my applciations from scratch again. So it is another overnighter running the backup and I’ll need most of tomorrow to do the restore. I’ll run the “Windows easy transfer” as well just to make sure I get everything.
Taking the computer out for another day will not make me popular. I hope it works this time as I’m back to work on Tuesday and have run out of time.
At some point next week my new Asus MN4SLI motherboard, PCI-E graphics card and AMD 64 x2 4200+ will arrive and that’ll be even more of a distraction from my cycle training and Cisco studies….
