switching to a Mac and Norton Ghost

[nyartist]

I'm taking the leap and getting a mini mac in spite of the fact that my PC is working perfectly... but I'm pumped! I need to transfer applications and files from my hard drive to the mac hard drive (I'll be using Fusion). Will Ghost do this job or do I need to install the applications first myself onto the mac and then transfer the files? Is using Ghost similar to cloning where every bit and byte will be transferred? Once I install my Windows XP onto the mac will copying everything over bring up any issues I should know about?

[InflatableMouse]

You can't use Ghost to clone your current pc's harddisk and restore it in Fusion. I don't know for sure but I don't think it will even boot, maybe in safe mode but even then you'd have a hard time getting everything working properly.

Consider using Vmware converter on your pc. It will create a Vm of your pc which you can use in Fusion on the mini.

[rcardona2k]

Actually going from machine-to-virtual machine (P2V) or Ghost .gho file to a virtual machine works fine. A Fusion VM will boot a regular bootable Ghost ISO file and you can restore a machine into a new virtual machine via it's virtual disk.

You can not however boot a Mac natively via Boot Camp and restore to the Boot Camp partition using Ghost or Acronis. These products do not understand the partitioning scheme used by Apple Boot Camp, e.g. MBR within GPT.

Note: with the hardware changes between your old machine and your new virtual machine, you may need to do a Windows repair installation, re-activate Windows (which may require calling Microsoft), and transfering your Windows license to a VM (a grey area of licensing) requires deleting Windows from your old machine.

[InflatableMouse]

Actually going from machine-to-virtual machine (P2V) or Ghost .gho file to a virtual machine works fine. A Fusion VM will boot a regular bootable Ghost ISO file and you can restore a machine into a new virtual machine via it's virtual disk.

Are you saying I can restore a physical machine's ghost image in a virtual machine and it will boot? This is interesting and not what I would expect at all. here's why. Windows will expect a bootdevice on a IDE controller so I would expect it to produce a 7B stop error or similar inaccessible boot device. Even if you change your Vm to IDE I'm sure there will be instances it will blue screen because the physical machines' IDE controller is not compatible with Vmware's. In the case the physical machine has a SCSI controller who's to say it will be compatible with Vmware's lsilogic driver? Last but not least there are guys like me who will install WIndows on the second partition of the third drive. This will never boot in Vmware since in there the boot partition is on disk 0 partition 0 unless you edit the boot.ini (or equivalent in vista).

Like I said I never tried it so I wouldn't know for sure. It's just that as far as I can see it your mileage with ghost images is determined more by luck than anything else.

Note: with the hardware changes between your old machine and your new virtual machine, you may need to do a Windows repair installation, re-activate Windows (which may require calling Microsoft), and transfering your Windows license to a VM (a grey area of licensing) requires deleting Windows from your old machine.

And that's one of my other problems. What happens with all the old hardware drivers? Some of these are core components of Windows (kernel mode drivers) and will left in the system as orphans or otherwise hidden and inactive devices. I would think this would leave the system either unstable or at least result in some unexpected behavior. Then there may be software installed that relies on these drivers some may be set to auto run or even run as a service.

The more I think of it, the more I believe this is a no-no. I'm interested to see how you think of all this.

[rcardona2k]

I understand your concern in this migration process. Windows actually carries a lot of drivers in various states of installation from drivers.cab (the "built-in" drivers) to actual driver files installed in system32\drivers. Of course, any devices Windows has actually been exposed to also influence a veritable rat's nest of hierarchies in the registry (from motherboards to NICs, scsi adapters, etc).

This said, migrating Windows can work with a Repair installation, where you are given a chance to provide SCSI drivers at boot and Windows will "re-wire" all of the driver support in your system. In the best case scenario, if your system is bootable, Windows will plug-n-play detect every driver in a new machine environment. In the worst case, the Repair installation, going through all the steps you normally go through to install, but preserving your installed applications will do it.

I have done these migrations from a physical laptop to Virtual PC, Virtual PC to Fusion (using a Windows Volume license). I've also converted machines running SCSI to IDE or vice-verse. Also handling non-ACPI to ACPI, or uniprocessor to symmetric multiprocessor.

Ideally you would use a utility that handles the P2V process much better like Acronis TrueImage w/Universal Restore, Platespin, or VMware Converter.

The larger hassle for most users are the licensing aspects like Windows Activation, where if you have an OEM (technically not allowed to be migrated), to retail (fpp license) where you have to call Microsoft for "permission" to move Windows.

[InflatableMouse]

Interesting.

The only similar thing I did in the past was take a harddisk from machine A and place it in machine B and get it to boot. I always got it to work either by plug and pray because it booted or by using the repair function and some hacking from the repair console or boot cd's. Further down the road, say days or weeks I always ran into unexpected behavior and I decided it was no longer worth it. I found a reinstallation was time better spent on the long run.

I may play with it again some time as I am running into situations that vmware converter doesn't work for all all the servers I have to consolidate to ESX.

[nyartist]

I'm the guy who made the original question and most of the replies have been a little bit over my head. So let me re-word this. I have a PC running XP and I'm buying a Mac Mini and using VMware Fusion so I can run mt windows applications - which are many, on the Mac. I just bought an XP OEM disk to install on the Mac. My question then is what would be the best way to get everything from my old PC hard drive to the hard drive on the Mac? I suppose I could just install the applications once I have Fusion in the Mac and then methodically transfer files over from the PC to the mac using a flash drive or something like that. But being that I have a digital certificate or two on my PC I know that it won't transfer over to the Mac and that's when I started to think about a full cloning operation. Which then led me to ask about Ghost..

[rcardona2k]

Sorry to go off-tangent. My original reply was my answer to your question.

On your followup - a fresh install of an OEM along with running XP's File and Settings Transfer Wizard would work well -- use the latest from Windows Update on your existing system and after installing your OEM afresh. I haven't tried certificates (I own a Verisign and one other), but I'm 90+ % certain XP's File and Settings transfer wizard handles those. It definitely handles bookmarks, regular documents, themes, desktop background, and many more settings.

Otherwise, like you said, Ghost will transfer all files, the OS, registry, etc. per what I wrote above.

edit: Added this note:

I did some research and Certificates can definitely exported in .pfx or PKCS#12 .p12 format and re-imported. This is both from within Internet Explorer and Firefox 2.0. If you're concerned about these, feel free to export them explicitly.

[InflatableMouse]

Sorry for the hijack.

I'd be interested to hear which method you chose and how it worked out for you once you've migrated your stuff.

[rcardona2k]

Not to go too off-topic. With the exception of some old MS Virtual Server machines, we've been able to migrate mostly anything to ESX Server. The company work for hosts thousands of virtual machines and we get them from all sorts of sources, P2V images, ghost, livestate, acronis, old VMware workstation, GSX/Server, even Fusion.