Ghost Solution Suite

I apologize if this has been discussed previously.

Equip:

Old - Dell 690 Precision workstation, image running Windows 7 pro 64 bit

New - HP Z820 workstation running RAID 5

Goal is to move the image from the old Dell 690 to the new Z820 RAID

My initial thought is that I should be able to put the old HD in the new system and ghost the image from the old SATA II HD to the new RAID 5.

I put the old HD into the new system and attempted to boot directly from the HD to see if Windows 7 had all the drivers I needed and of course it didn't(I had t enable legacy support and change the SATA mode to IDE in order to get it to boot).  

The helpful HP rep told me that I needed to install the Intel Rapid Storage Tech driver.  I did so and it continued to boot correctly until I attempted to change the SATA mode to AHCI + RAID, now it pasts POST and I get a BSOD with a x7 error code (storage related).  

We have tried to manipulate the registry to get it to let go of the old storage drivers and boot using the new ones but can't get it to work.

My question:

What is the best way for me to move that old image to the new one and get the new hardware drivers to work?

Thanks for any help!

I should also add that I have used Ghost for imaging in the past, but I have never had to add drivers to the build in order for windows to boot.

How do I add drivers to the build using Ghost so that windows boots properly?

Thanks for the response, however I tried the above registry solution and still wasn't able to get it to work.

Pardon my ignorance, but I have never used sysprep when imaging.  Is there some documentation that would explaining how to do this?

If you want to just move the disk, you need to enable the new drivers in the registry setting the start type to boot. You would do this before you move the disk.
e.g:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\iaStorAV or HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\iaStorV You would need to know the driver YOU need. Then set it's "Start" value to 0 zero. However it may still blue screen because of different processor or other hardware.

You may want to take a ghost image to save. Then sysprep the system assuming you have the needed drivers installed. Then copy the syspred image to the new machine. If it fails you can always put the original un-syspred image back on the original machine.

Pete

Learning about sysprep is big topic - you need to research Windows Deployment Toolkit and Windows Automated Installation Kit. These are free tools.

So if it didn't work then there are other missing drivers.

You need to create a folder in say root of C:\Drivers and then place all the drivers you need for the new system in subfolders.
This is done while still in W7 on original machine.

Then you use pnputil -a C:\drivers\folderx\*.inf etc this "injects the drivers" into W7. This is tedious if you have many drivers to add.

Using a PowerShell script you can automate it to create bat. You then run bat file as Admin.

Open PowerShell and cd to C:\Drivers

New-Item -ItemType file C:\Drivers\DriverList.txt | Out-Null

get-childitem "C:\Drivers" -recurse | where {$_.extension -eq ".inf"} | foreach {

$CommandLine = "C:\Windows\System32\pnputil.exe -a " + """$_.FullName"""

Add-Content C:\Drivers\DriverList.txt $CommandLine

}

Add-Content C:\Drivers\DriverList.txt pause

Move-Item C:\Drivers\DriverList.txt C:\Drivers\DriverList.bat

Write-Host "Finished"

I would never recommend moving operating systems between different hardware platforms especially where there are different hard disk subsystems involved as well. You could spend hundreds of hours trying to resolve intermittent obscure errors when the time taken to reinstall the software would be much less.

This is a highly customized build with lots of development time involved with customized applications.  It isn't possible to just start from scratch without lots of time with the developers.  

The last time we had to recover from scratch, it took two weeks to reinstall/configure one portion of the application suite.

In that case, what I would recommend is the following:

1. Remove the existing hard disk from the old system, and replace with a blank disk.

2. Install your current operating system on the blank disk.

3. Inject the candidate drivers for the RAID hard disk subsystem on the new machine.

4. Move the hard disk to the new system and see if it will boot. If not, repeat the driver injection process until it does.

5. Once you have the necessary process sorted out, apply to your existing production hard disk and then make a Ghost copy and apply to new machine.

6. Once new machine is booted, you will then have to install drivers for any hardware flagged in device manager as needing them.