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RE: documents and settings transfer

maygood — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 01:59:45 GMT

It really is painless. When a problem arises now (not that often, but sometimes after a M$ update) it is often quicker to just Ghost the drive rather that try to find a remedy. I sometimes do it instead of just uninstalling all the games on my PC as it gets rid of all the leftovers too.

I don't often install anything to my rig before testing it in a VM beforehand and if the fix isn't just a case of undoing what you did last that caused the problem then my best friend,a bootable Ghost cd (how sad am I?), magically appears in my hand before I had chance to type "Google.co.uk"

RE: documents and settings transfer

alex3410 — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 23:53:51 GMT

i was able to get the data from the cloned HDD :D just had to do all my settings my self :( but as soon as i am done setting it all up i will clone the HDD again so next time i need to reinstall it it will be painless :P

partiining is a good idea and much better then trusting MS :P

thanks

RE: documents and settings transfer

maygood — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 23:49:35 GMT

:) been there done that :)

I don't want to preach to the knowledgeable but planning a way of working and sticking to it really is a must in my book.

Yes it's boring and no we all don't all backup our data as often as we should (if ever) but once you find a way that works for you it's nearly automatic.

My method is to create 2 partitions, one for OS and programs and the other for all data. Install anything that you must have and move the My Documents folder to the second partition (only needed if you just click the default save location) and my Outlook .pst file then create a ghost image. Any problems just ghost the c: partition (or even do a clean install if needed) with no (well not much, in my case just bookmarks.html for firefox) need to make sure you backed up everything

RE: documents and settings transfer

alex3410 — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 23:30:06 GMT

i cloned the drive at the start to back it all up so if something went wrong i could put it in and be ok

i then wanted to transfer everything to new install as current one is nearly 2 years old :P

it took it 3 hours to create the transfer files and seemed like it was going to take longer to restore them:angry: so have ended it and will now (when i have sorted out a driver issue) only do settings and copy files my self :P

all i can say is cloning the hdd @ the start was a life saver :P never put your trust in one thing :hehe:

edit:

:angry:
it does not work it keeps crashing just before it finishes i have tried about 8 times 2 in safe mode and with 2 different pen drives:angry:

just think if i had not cloned the HDD i would be well and truly stuffed right about now

RE: documents and settings transfer

maygood — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 23:13:20 GMT

If you are doing a disk to disk clone there would be no need to transfer anything surely :)

RE: documents and settings transfer

alex3410 — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:55:39 GMT

:D thank you, very useful link :D

as soon as my HDD is cloned i will run the settings wizzard :D

thanks again

RE: documents and settings transfer

KILLFC — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:38:40 GMT

The fastwiz covers pretty much all your of your documents held within your profile plus all your printer settings and favourites desktop wallpaper etc etc. The main thing to remember is that it only copies the data for the user account you are logged onto at the time. So if you have several accounts you will need to log in and run the wizard for each account.

I wont bother writing too much about it as this linky http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb457074.aspx says pretty much everything you need to know.

Please note that obviously you will need to use the same version of fastwiz when exporting and importing the settings so my tip would be to find the fastwiz app and copy it to a thumb drive and use that executable only.

Also Vista is slightly different in that you will need to run the vista version of fastwiz on the vistabox first which will create an executable to use on the xp client.

documents and settings transfer

alex3410 — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 10:54:17 GMT

the documents and settings transfer wizard is something i have not really used for my own needs before and was just curious as to what it actually covers?