Transfer programs from Windows 7 to new Windows install

[RFHarris]

I have Windows 7 on a hard drive with a corrupted boot sequence. I made a clean Windows 7 installation on a new hard drive. Is there any way I can transfer programs from the old installation to the new one? Both are on the same computer.

 

[severedsolo]

Hi RFHarris, welcome to Sevenforums

If you have a system image of the machine back when it was working, then it's possible to reimage your drive so that the new programs will still be installed. Effectively a image is a "snapshot" of the PC as it was then.

I'm going to stick my neck out here a little though, and assume that you don't have one, or you wouldn't have had to reinstall. In that case I'm afraid that the programs will have to be reinstalled, in order to correctly write the registry keys. Merely copying the "Program Files" folder over won't help I'm afraid.

Hope that helps,

 

[ignatzatsonic]

I have Windows 7 on a hard drive with a corrupted boot sequence. I made a clean Windows 7 installation on a new hard drive. Is there any way I can transfer programs from the old installation to the new one? Both are on the same computer.

No.

You will have to reinstall all of your programs. You can "transfer" personal data, including uninstalled programs, but not installed programs.

 

[RFHarris]

I do have a backup image made by acronis about 2 months old it would be satisfactory, it is on a home network computer, but I have changed out my MB in the meantime so don't believe it will boot now after restoral

 

[RFHarris]

Sorry posted twice

 

[severedsolo]

I honestly have no idea whether it will accept it or not with a new Mobo, I'd say be safe though and just reinstall the programs, in the long run it could be less effort.

 

[theog]

What do you mean by "corrupted boot sequence"?

 

[RFHarris]

In this case I changed out my MB and Windows 7 would not boot, I went back and reinstalled old MB and ran Sysprep which finished ok. When I booted up I got so far along and then got into a "Windows cannot Continue" type loop. Checking the internet there have been others with the same type of problem but any solutions suggested did not solve the problem, so now I have a system which will not boot with my old MB or my new one. I have stuff set up on my old system which I need so want to avoid a total reinstall if at all possible.

I have a 2 month old Acronis image on a home network that I can restore but will not boot with the new MB. Trying to get a Paragon Adaptive Restore CD to see if that will help. In the meantime looking for any other ideas.

 

[severedsolo]

Im assuming this is a retail copy of Windows 7?

The easiest way would be to restore the image, and then run a Startup Repair that should sort it. You may need to run the Startup Repair up to 3 times, depending on how bad it is.

 

[gregrocker]

I'm afraid your only option now may be Paragon Adaptive Restore, if the image won't start on the new mobo as is often the case.

I seem to remember that you reinstalled the mobo to attempt to SysPrep the HD so it would start on new mobo. One last resort may be to PM the SysPrep tutorial author and expert Kari to ask for his help in that thread as he may have a workaround for the error you are getting on that heroic attempt.

 

[theog]

Hi Greg
I am not sure if PAR will work with this one, as Sysprep has not finished.
There may be a driver missing, like Sata Controller.

 

[RFHarris]

Well I am finally able to restore most of my system as it was before changing out my MB. I spent a few days on the internet researching the problem I ran into and found that others also have had serious problems with the Sysprep process and some without resolution. I appreciate the help I received here and on the Internet but in the end nothing seemed to help. I extracted the Setup.EDL file to a USB key drive and evaluated it, everything was OK and the last message was that Windeploy.exe was running. I was able to edit the registry on the damaged system and after doing an examination I found the keys commanding the system to run the OOBE process but resetting the keys did not do any good as they were overwritten again to start the OOBE process at step 1. Apparently there is something in %windir% files or elsewhere that is also directing the system to run the OOBE process and it resets the registry to accomplish that.

I also had problems with Acronis backup and recovery. I had a two month old back that I would have been glad to restore and use. But the backup location is on another computer on my home network which runs Windows XP, somehow even though I backed up my Windows 7 C: drive Acronis did something to the backup file that made it think it should be running under XP because when I recovered the file and tried to boot it, it gave me a message "missing boot.ini" and also an ntkernel file. Boot.ini does not exist for Windows 7. I also got Paragon's adaptive restore disk and used that but it didn't get either my Syspreped hard disk or my Acronis recovered hard disk to boot. I will continue in the next post to explain how I did get my crictical apps and data restored.

 

[gregrocker]

Were you running PAR on the same HD you attempted to SysPrep?

I've seen SysPrep fail before but not PAR on a known-good HD. Could be SysPrep corrupted it.

 

[RFHarris]

I tried several combinations to restore my system because I had some critical data for certain applications that is naturally encoded (i.e. not text based) and can only be read by the app. I made a fresh copy of Windows 7 on a new disk and from that system I could access all the data from the boot damaged system. Examining the Desktop and program file folders I could determine which applications I needed to recover. Copying data from the boot damaged system to the new system is straight foward but getting the app to run required that registry keys be set. I booted from the failing system and after getting the "Starting System Services" message and then the error window "Windows cannot complete the installation, etc." message then pressing Shift F10 brings up the command window which has some limited functions available. You can access the Setup.EDL file from here, navigating to the root drive cd\ you can type in regedit to edit the registry, I used the find function under the Edit process to find any keys that pertained to the app in question. You can then right click on the key section and select export, you can name the file anything that makes sense to you but it must .reg type. I saved it to my new Windows 7 drive which was the E: drive at that point. I booted back to my good Windows 7 drive and then double clicked on the reg files I had saved after verification it will automatically enter it into your registry. Having copied the program folder and data from the damaged system to the new system it worked for me. I only needed about three apps the rest I could just simply reinstall. I hope that something here may help others if they get into this type of situation.

I bought a book entitled "Windows 7 annoyances" it was over an inch thick and somethings might be more than just an annoyance. It is a useful book to me. I left the IT field many years ago and didn't think I would have to struggle with these kinds of problems again. I skipped the Vista upgrade but I learned that Windows 7 has plenty of issues with it, I had thought that Microsoft would have remedies for Windows 7 problems such as I faced but couldn't find any that worked. Also was surprised that there was not an easy migration path from Windows XP to Windows 7 for the non technical user. If Windows 7 gets stabilized and tuned up I don't think I will be upgrading again now that I have enough memory capacity in a 64 bit. system.

 

[RFHarris]

Were you running PAR on the same HD you attempted to SysPrep?

I've seen SysPrep fail before but not PAR on a known-good HD. Could be SysPrep corrupted it.

I don't think it is a matter of PAR failing it was just that the problem was really in the registry at that point and maybe in some settings in the %windir% directories, as far as I know PAR did it's job.

I ran PAR from both the DVD disk and from my new Win 7 installation where I have Paragon software installed.

 

[gregrocker]

Only way I know to run PAR is from its CD, choosing "Adjust OS" to remove all drivers, hardware ID and activation. Was that tried?

It always works to start Win7 which hasn't been corrupted already by SysPrep failure - which is the reason I mentioned it, since I have seen that failure.

 

[SIW2]

Win 7 problem it seems.

Shame you couldn't pin it down after a valiant effort.

Glad you managed to get your app. registry settings across fine.

I had a possibly related issue just now.

Out of interest, I created an install.wim from the recovery partition on an oem machine.

Then installed it on mine.

Was able to get to the desktop ok , but sysprep popped up every reboot.

Fixed it with this

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Setup]
"SetupType"=dword:00000000
"SystemSetupInProgress"=dword:00000000
"SetupPhase"=dword:00000000
"CmdLine"=""
"OOBEInProgress"=dword:00000000

I suppose that is what you did offline.

 

[gregrocker]

Recognize that as the fix for factory OEM Setup screen that pops up at every boot.

 

[SIW2]

Every boot of what, when Greg

 

[gregrocker]

There's an infrequent problem where Users set up new factory OEM Win7 then every time they restart it wants to do the setup over again. Setting all of those keys shown to 0 is the fix for that, as I recall.