Tweet
This is kind of related to my other thread, with Vista. Namely in that they both involve my new laptop.
So, my current laptop has a fairly large hard drive (80 gigs) and contains a lot of data, including personal files. My new laptop will have a 160 gig hard drive. Right now, I'm thinking of saving my current laptop's HDD as an image file and porting it over as an installation of XP under MS Virtual PC. I do realize that the image file would be enormous (80 gigs, or however big all the files added up are, assuming little to no compression, which is frankly what I'm expecting from something like this) and would contain everything. My hopes is that I would be able to just nuke the current laptop hard drive altogether and make it into a public/private fileserver. Not the best plan as a laptop, but at least it maintains usefulness.
Do this would also insure that I wouldn't lose anything as it would all be under Virtual PC on the new laptop.
So, my question is, is this even possible? If so, what would you recommend for making the image file? I'm assuming a .iso would work just as well as the VPC file, but would it be able to boot as XP, without having to reinstall XP on the VPC image?
Also, a new development in the last five minutes: my current laptop's display has stopped working. It'll show for a minute (long enough to show startup information and about 5 seconds of loading on the desktop and then cut to off (not blacked out, off). Restarting doesn't help, closing/opening the monitor will cause it to be shown for a second, and then turn off again, like it was shut. So, if it keeps up, the only way I'd be able to pull the 80 gigs of information would be off the (unstable wireless) network (damn you AT&T router), and that's assuming I put the entire drive on shared, which is possible.
So, my current laptop has a fairly large hard drive (80 gigs) and contains a lot of data, including personal files. My new laptop will have a 160 gig hard drive. Right now, I'm thinking of saving my current laptop's HDD as an image file and porting it over as an installation of XP under MS Virtual PC. I do realize that the image file would be enormous (80 gigs, or however big all the files added up are, assuming little to no compression, which is frankly what I'm expecting from something like this) and would contain everything. My hopes is that I would be able to just nuke the current laptop hard drive altogether and make it into a public/private fileserver. Not the best plan as a laptop, but at least it maintains usefulness.
Do this would also insure that I wouldn't lose anything as it would all be under Virtual PC on the new laptop.
So, my question is, is this even possible? If so, what would you recommend for making the image file? I'm assuming a .iso would work just as well as the VPC file, but would it be able to boot as XP, without having to reinstall XP on the VPC image?
Also, a new development in the last five minutes: my current laptop's display has stopped working. It'll show for a minute (long enough to show startup information and about 5 seconds of loading on the desktop and then cut to off (not blacked out, off). Restarting doesn't help, closing/opening the monitor will cause it to be shown for a second, and then turn off again, like it was shut. So, if it keeps up, the only way I'd be able to pull the 80 gigs of information would be off the (unstable wireless) network (damn you AT&T router), and that's assuming I put the entire drive on shared, which is possible.
Comment