[ltp] Moving windows

[André Wyrwa]

Hei,

> This is slightly OT, but I wonder if anyone has done this successfully.
> I've just bought a Thinkpad X22 (secondhand, great machine), and it 
> comes with Win2k. I'm going to wipe the HDD and install Linux only. 
> However, I'd like to put the Windows install onto my desktop machine - 
> it's occasionally useful to have via QEMU. So, my questions:
> 
> 1)Is it legal to do this? I know it *ought* to be.

Depends on your country, i think. I know that it is legal in Germany, 
but probably not in the USA.

> 2)Is it possible? If so, how? (I haven't got any form of install/rescue 
> disk)

You will find a folder C:\i386. It has all the Windows installation 
files. Back that up to a CD-ROM and put it on a partition on your 
harddrive. Get a bootable Windows setup CD and boot that. During install 
  you can change the source of the installation files to that partition 
at some point.

> 3)If I just dd it across over the network, will it boot OK, and is there 
> any way to shrink the "partition"?

dd-ing means you have to have an equally sized (or larger?) destination 
partition. Shrinking is possible afterwards through NTFS-resize.

An alternative would be a filesystem based copy under Windows. See
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_copy_a_Windows_installation for that.

André.