Restore Win XP image on TI 2011 to Win 7 64bit using TI 2010

gini wrote:

I haven't migrated many of my programs to the laptop, but I want to be prepared for an emergency. I use TI 2011 on the desktop system, but had to use TI 2010 on the laptop for compatibility reasons. This leads to my question: I regularly image my primary partition on the desktop where I have most programs, data, and documents. How could such an image be used if I needed to apply it to the laptop?

I believe you could explore the desktop image archive and select individual files from it, and copy them to the laptop. Not sure if all versions of TI can read all other versions .tib files though. If you use the latest bootable CD that should be able to read any .tib I would think.

I have made a bootable TI 2010 CD (from My Products download), but will an image made with TI 2011 be functional?

not sure, but a bootable CD made from the latest version should be functional with anything, try that approach.

If I can restore the XP image onto the Win 7 computer, what is the effect of having the two different operating systems involved?

First of all the image of the XP system has different drivers, etc. so putting it on your laptop will be problematic. You may be able to fix the mismatched driver issue by re-installing them in the XP environment, but I'm not sure, I've never done that. People here have done that kind of thing in the past, so I think it is technically possible, but requires additional work above and beyond a simple image restore operation.

Would a duel-boot automatically be created when a restore is done?

I think you would need a boot manager, but I'm not sure, others here know a lot more about that than I do. I dual-boot, but use a boot manager so I don't know if there's another way to do it entirely within Windows or not.

I'm trying to understand the role True Image plays in migrating to an entirely different new computer, and I appreciate any help you can offer. Thank you!

Generally the image restore process is intended for putting partitions back onto the original system, not a new one. Of course, pure data partitions are totally portable between systems, but you can do that without imaging software anyway. Your system partition is somewhat tied to the hardware of the original platform. There is an Acronis upgrade version that claims to allow you to move between hardware platforms, but I haven't used it so I can't give any more details unfortunately.

Thank you for your reply! You reinforced my own (somewhat confused) impression that a backup image would essentially be of use only in the same system, and particularly in the case of hard drive failure. I think I'm fairly well protected for that scenario, and I do have critical data and documents backed-up independent of the images.