[ltp] Moving windows

[Christopher Sawtell]

On Saturday 08 October 2005 12:31, Richard Neill wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> 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.
Strictly speaking, No. But I don't think the BSA will smash your door down and 
cart you off to the Dungeons of Guantanamo Bay if you did that in the privacy 
of your own home. OTOH if you were to reproduce the information onto CDs or 
DVDs and then sell them the BSA might get somewhat more than slightly tetchy.

> 2)Is it possible?
Yes:-
> If so, how? (I haven't got any form of install/rescue disk)
1) back it up, using dd from a LiveCD, to space on your other machine.
   ( Just in case of accidents, because you haven't got a Windows rescue CD. )

2) Take care to read up on parted first and to do a scandisk and defrag in 
windows. Then shrink/compress the partition to whatever the Win2k will fit 
into using either of the linux utilities parted or qtparted. These are on 
many LiveCDs

3) Move this smaller image across your net saving it as win2k.iso, and delete 
the previous backup.

> 3)If I just dd it across over the network, will it boot OK,
If you use QEMU, it might, on the other hand it might not. ( Win2k off the 
original Windows CD works ok under Qemu, I not sure about an OEM version 
running on different hardware ) Of course if you want to boot it off the disk 
you will have to repartition your disk and install it in the first partition.

> and is there any way to shrink the "partition"?
See above.

You should be able to get a set of install CDs for the X22 off IBM. Tell them 
your CoA key number and that your disk failed and you need to re-install onto 
a new drive. 

-- 
CS