I did BMR to different hardware twice and it was gruesome enough that I
now recommend against it. Windows gets comfy in its hardware, settling
in with all the right drivers for the hardware you have on that machine.
Put it to bed in its comfy old home, transport it to a new home, wake it
up, and it is very disoriented. It's got the Registry for a different
house, and nothing is where it used to be anymore. It can't find the
bathroom, the jar of mayonaise has been replaced by Miracle Whip, who
knows where the silverware drawer is, and the microwave works totally
differently. It may not run at all. If it does, you're going to have to
go throguh many iterations of reloading device drivers, redefining
things like NIC cards that now have different MAC addresses, and so on.
At one point I had so many ghost devices that I simply deleted ALL
devices and let it find everything all over again. On average, it has
taken me twelve reboots and at least one Regedit.

Windows is the least transportable and least modular OS ever. Don't
expect any restore procedure involving restore of the Registry to
different hardware to work, but if it does, consider it serendipity.

The new hardware will almost always have a much larger disk drive, and
might come from the factory with a newer OS version preinstalled. Either
just use that, or do a full new install, and then restore all the old
files to an "Old Machine" folder so the end-user can fetch their
documents and other files as needed. "You're in a new house, but the
boxes with all your stuff from your old house are down in the basement
where you can get what you need."

This issue most frequently comes up with stolen laptops.

Roger Deschner      University of Illinois at Chicago     rogerd AT uic DOT edu
==="If a train station is where a train stops, what's a work station?"==


On Mon, 14 Jul 2003, Bill Boyer wrote:

>Did a BMR of a Windows2000 server to a different more current hardware.
>After the restore it wouldn't let us assign the IP address to the "new"
>adapter because it said there was an "old" adapter with that address already
>defined. Going to the Device manager the old adapters did not show up with
>the little yellow icon sayint they were inactive/in error. We couldn't find
>a way to uninstall the "old" adapter definitions so we could assign the IP
>address to the "new" adapter.
>
>Anyone run into similar situations like this wiht BMR to different hardware?
>We ended up searching the registry for the adapter string and deleteing all
>those keys. Not pretty, but it worked.
>
>Bill Boyer
>"Some days you are the bug, some days you are the windshield." - ??
>