Moving Vista installation to new machinery

I have Vista Business and had it on a Pentium 4 3Ghz machine. Unfortunately,
its motherboard blew. Fortunately for me, I had yet another Pentium 4 3Ghz
with a slightly different motherboard not doing much so pulled the drives
and hardware out of the machine that had Vista and shoved them in the other
case. I had done this sort of thing before with XP and thought that, like
XP, all I would have to do at most is to repair install and then install the
other motherboard's drivers and possibly activate again and that would be
that but no, vista wouldnt do that, would it?

I have tried everything I can but in the end came to the conclusion that you
cannot move an in place Vista from one machine to another should the
motherboard, CPU etc fail. That was what I wanted to do.

So could anyone tell me if that is wrong, please and if you CAN do it, HOW?
I cant find out.

Thanks.

Hi Grey,

Your conclusion is correct. You cannot move a Vista installation to
different hardware and do a repair installation to load the proper drivers.
That function does not exist in Vista as the method of installing the OS has
changed. The old way, like was used in XP and its predecessors, was to
overwrite/replace files with the version used by the OS for each device
(which, by the way, could have been older or newer than the one in use
causing other issues). The new way is basically an image being laid down
followed by a hardware detection routine to load the proper files to match
the hardware profile. This newer method does not provide any means of
updating an existing installation.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/
Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com

"Grey" <grey@example.com> wrote in message
news:eYxp5EaoIHA.3652@TK2MSFTNGP03.phx.gbl...
>I have Vista Business and had it on a Pentium 4 3Ghz machine.
>Unfortunately, its motherboard blew. Fortunately for me, I had yet another
>Pentium 4 3Ghz with a slightly different motherboard not doing much so
>pulled the drives and hardware out of the machine that had Vista and shoved
>them in the other case. I had done this sort of thing before with XP and
>thought that, like XP, all I would have to do at most is to repair install
>and then install the other motherboard's drivers and possibly activate
>again and that would be that but no, vista wouldnt do that, would it?
>
> I have tried everything I can but in the end came to the conclusion that
> you cannot move an in place Vista from one machine to another should the
> motherboard, CPU etc fail. That was what I wanted to do.
>
> So could anyone tell me if that is wrong, please and if you CAN do it,
> HOW? I cant find out.
>
> Thanks.

Thanks. I thought so. I don't think the local I.T. managers will like this!
I certainly don't!

"Rick Rogers" <rick@mvps.org> wrote in message
news:eU9CQJvoIHA.552@TK2MSFTNGP06.phx.gbl...
> Hi Grey,
>
> Your conclusion is correct. You cannot move a Vista installation to
> different hardware and do a repair installation to load the proper
> drivers. That function does not exist in Vista as the method of installing
> the OS has changed. The old way, like was used in XP and its predecessors,
> was to overwrite/replace files with the version used by the OS for each
> device (which, by the way, could have been older or newer than the one in
> use causing other issues). The new way is basically an image being laid
> down followed by a hardware detection routine to load the proper files to
> match the hardware profile. This newer method does not provide any means
> of updating an existing installation.
>
> --
> Best of Luck,
>
> Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP
> http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/
> Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
> My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com
>
> "Grey" <grey@example.com> wrote in message
> news:eYxp5EaoIHA.3652@TK2MSFTNGP03.phx.gbl...
>>I have Vista Business and had it on a Pentium 4 3Ghz machine.
>>Unfortunately, its motherboard blew. Fortunately for me, I had yet another
>>Pentium 4 3Ghz with a slightly different motherboard not doing much so
>>pulled the drives and hardware out of the machine that had Vista and
>>shoved them in the other case. I had done this sort of thing before with
>>XP and thought that, like XP, all I would have to do at most is to repair
>>install and then install the other motherboard's drivers and possibly
>>activate again and that would be that but no, vista wouldnt do that, would
>>it?
>>
>> I have tried everything I can but in the end came to the conclusion that
>> you cannot move an in place Vista from one machine to another should the
>> motherboard, CPU etc fail. That was what I wanted to do.
>>
>> So could anyone tell me if that is wrong, please and if you CAN do it,
>> HOW? I cant find out.
>>
>> Thanks.
>