Hello Stephane, On Wednesday, July 21, 2010 you wrote:
SB> Hi Jack, SB> Two points... SB> 1. Creating an image of your running system is a good solution, but never forget : it allow you to restore the whole working system, but on the same or similar computer... when you need to move to a new system (another hardware / another OS), you should reinstall from scratch your apps and reconfigure from scratch, only restoring datas.... there's of course a lot of "solutions" allowing you to (partly) restore settings, but you would have a much better system if you do not try to adapt your old settings on the new system, but directly adapt your datas for the new settings of the new system. Understood. If I had had an image of the old laptop I could have simply replaced the blown HDD and restored the image. However, since neither I nor my wife ever trusted the old laptop (erratic operation), we felt safer buying a brand new laptop. My problems (read confusion) came about because as I mentioned, the old laptop had been upgraded from native Win XP to Win 7. My lack of knowledge of native Win 7 caused me considerable consternation in trying to figure out how I had managed to cause two PROGRAM FILES folders to appear on the C: drive. If a similar HDD crash were to occur on this new laptop and I had an image of the HDD before the crash, I would simply replace the HDD and restore from the image. That would be my reasoning for creating an image of this new laptop. I would create images, perhaps weekly, and then continue doing regular daily routine (not image) backups. SB> 2. You may migrate a fat partition to NTFS without the need to reformat and thus without loosing the datas on it... have a look at "convert.exe" commandline utility.... what you need to know before : if you convert your USB HDD to NTFS it could not be used anymore on something else than Windows... it means you cannot use it anymore to connect to a PS3, DVD Player, TV, Photo Frame, audio car system,... and it could be much more difficult to revert to FAT than converting to NTFS, as windows itself does not allow natively to FAT32 format a partition bigger than 32GB... The Western Digital "Passport" USB drive we use for backups on the laptop isn't used for anything else so I wouldn't be losing any functionality by converting to NTFS. But that information is good to know. Thanks again for your help. -- Jack LaRosa mailto:jlar...@charter.net Sticking with with The Bat! ver: 4.0.38 for now. Operating? with Windows XP Pro ver 5 build 2600 Service Pack 3 ________________________________________________ Current version is 4.2.23 | 'Using TBUDL' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
