Windows 7: Windows 7 Installation - Transfer to a New Computer

Hi MickeeJay, welcome to the Seven Forums.

Sysprep always targets the host, computer and Windows installation it is run. You can not sysprep an external drive. I think your friends best shot would be to reinstall on new motherboard.

Kari

Just wanted to say thank you for this great tutorial Kari. I am replacing the motherboard and PSU in my older PC and will do a sysrep on the OS drive before I start.

Thanks, Jay.

Read the tutorial first, before starting. I have noticed that the WMP Network Service I tell about at the end of the tutorial is often causing restoring the image to fail, even when there was no error message when sysprepping. Therefore I recommend always to stop said service as told in tutorial before sysprepping.

Kari

As a precaution, I've made a small batch file to automate this and starting the SysPrep itself.

That's a good idea. Very good indeed.

It is a mystery to me why sysprep hates WMP Network Sharing Service. I have studied and researched and tried everything, I simply can not find a logical explanation.

Fact remains: Most common reason for sysprep to fail, excluding of course faulty answer files, is the said service.

Kari

Thanks Kari. I did the sysrep last night and I read the section about WMP Service. I tried running sysrep first without stopping the service, but I did get the error message, so I had to. After that sysrep did its thing without any problems.

@ oreo27 I will keep the batch file you wrote in mind, should I ever need to do another sysrep. Thanks much!

[QUOTE=Kari;2267657][QUOTE=oreo27;2267602]I guess it's just one of those mysteries

This tutorial really saved my hide once. I don't keep disc images since I don't have the disk capacity to do so. Then one day, I managed to screw my installation up with Ccleaner. Instead of formatting again, what I did was made a new installation with most of the applications I have in a Virtual Machine. Sysprepped and imaged that using start (You guys should really check out this great imaging tool). Restored said image and voila, I was back in business instead of having more or less a week of no PC usage due to installations and such.

I wouldn't even have learned what SysPrep is if not for this tutorial.


No worries. I honestly wouldn't even call it a batch file. It's just 3 lines of what appears to be code

... and it could be reduced to two lines .

CD command (Change Directory, the word we used earlier for Folder) is not needed when the command has the full path included, so this would be enough:
Kari

Good eye. I didn't notice that was the old batch I had.

Hey Kari!

I'm switching my AMD setup to an Intel setup.

So that means i'd be changing my motherboard, cpu and ram.

Note the new motherboard uses UEFI bios while the old one doesn't

So I won't need to do a fresh install of windows 7 if I use sysprep?