I lost my desktop Win7 development machine, including the disk drive (apparently) to a power surge a few months ago.
I have a Norton Ghost full drive backup from a couple months before the crash. I have built a new machine, but it has a different motherboard than the old one. (New machine is an ASUS P8-Z77 MB with a Core i5/socket 1155 processor. The old one was a GigaBYTE motherboard from about 4 years ago, with a Core i7/socket 1366 processor.)
I would like to be able to use the Ghost backup as a starting point for this machine so that I don't have to re-install/re-configure all my apps. However, it's seeming to be a case of you can't get there from here.
When I restore the drive, and do the startup repair from Windows install disk to regenerate the boottrack and Boot Manager, the machine will begin to start up, and gets about 2 seconds into the splash screen (where the colored dots are beginning to come together into the logo), then reboots. I've tried it in safe mode, and it goes through about a screen full of DLL's that it's loading, then just stops and reboots. I've got the driver installation disk that came with the new motherboard, but I can't figure out a way to use it to install the drivers on the system disk if I can't at least get safe mode up.
Any suggestions, or am I just going to have to start from a clean install and re-pave the whole machine. (I know that since everything is backed up on the Norton image, I'll be able to recover all my data, it's just a matter of convenience.)
sysprep
generalise on the old computer. Obviously this does not work if the old computer already died. You can try to boot in safe mode and to run sysprep. I never tried it that way, but there is a chance....