Catastrophic PC failure

[ba55meister]

out of curiosity i would try to boot the new machine up with the old image, if that won't work use ghost explorer to grad any data you might need.
Ideally create a new ghost image for your new pc

[Durbs]

It would probably boot. Windows is pretty good at detecting the changes and adjusting the drivers accordingly. Of course it aint 100% guaranteed.

Best way is to run a clean install and then mount the Ghost image just like a normal backup and copy only what you need over. Then you wont have your shiny new PC filled with a huge load of old redundant driver crud from the old installation.

[JoJoGabor]

Its not drivers that will stop it booting but the HAL.dll (Hardware abstraction Layer) The HAL.dll is compiled when the OS is installed, so assuming you have the same OS on the new laptop, find the HAL.dll and copy it to a floppy or hard drive, USB etc. Image your new laptop, then using a boot CD such as BartPE or Winpe boot from CD, and copy over the HAL.dll you copied earlier over the hal.dll of your newly imaged laptop. That should ensure it boots and you can then mess about with any necessary drivers (hint: do the network first to get internet access to download the drivers)

If your new OS is different to your Ghost image, you could install the old OS (eg XP) onto the new laptop as a dual boot and get the newly created hal.dll this way.

[scooterscot]

Get a Mac

[chicane]

Get a Mac

[Jaws]

I've transferred a hard disk to another pc before successfully. There is a command in windows which will strip out the drivers so on the next boot the new drivers are installed (or you are prompted for disks). The command is "sysprep" and I can't remember how to use it.

Doing a repair install (booting the winxp cd + repairing the existing installation) might also be a good option (although this I have not tried).

[darmstadt]

I've created Ghost images of laptops and successfully restored them to VMWare systems with just a lot of having to install new drivers with no problems.

[dinker]

I`ve done this before, it will work no matter what the hardware is. I used the Arstechnica guide:

http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news...ng-windows.ars