HDD---->>>>Norton Ghost 14<<<<----Help..Please!

[Mattaniah]

{Can Some One Help Me}--->>>I had a sony vaio, it was stolen yesterday, but i have a ghosted image of my drive from when i replaced my mother board...Can i ghost my old system onto a new laptop?

 

[WyomingKnott]

These are guesses from someone who uses Norton Ghost 8, plus Acronis True Image.

First, if you have a ghosted full-drive image you can recover the contents of the drive.

Second, even if you recover the contents of the drive to a new drive, unless you get the same kind of laptop the odds are against the restored drive booting all the way into Windows. There will be too many differences in the needed drivers.

I won't tell you the best thing to do, I will tell you what I would do.

First, get any sort of hard drive and use another computer to do a Norton restore of the image to the new drive. Even if it's an IDE drive you borrowed from your grandfather. Just make sure that everything is there. (BTW, what is this image stored on?)

Second, if you buy a new laptop, do a complete image backup of its internal disk, or remove its internal disk and replace it with a new one. If the rest of this messes up the new machine, at least you'll be able to get it working again.

Third, using another machine or the new laptop booted from Norton Ghost on external media (NOT running the OS on the new machine), restore the backup to the new drive. Then boot the new machine from a Windows installation disk (Do you have one?) and choose to Repair an Existing Installation. This will give you the best chance of getting the right drivers for the new machine.

Fourth, boot and see if it actually works. If it doesn't, if you at least saw the data in step the first, do a clean OS install on the new laptop and restore all of your data from the image.

Fifth, pal around with some hackers and see if they can find your laptop online. There's a wonderful story on Utube about a hacker who spent months tracking down, taking over, and finding his stolen machine. Revenge is sweet.