Hey Y’all,
I just finished my first use of the ReDeploy (to different hardware) feature and I thought y’all might be interested in how it turned out, if so read on.
After returning from a trip my Wife’s laptop (of course it had to be her’s!) wouldn’t recognize anything in the USB 2 port (the USB 3 port never worked right and you guessed it the machine, Dell XPS 14z, only has 2 USB ports). So her wireless mouse and USB keyboard no longer worked and of course I couldn’t do a backup to a USB HD (I’d taken one before the trip…my momma didn’t raise any dummy’s :lol:). However, she had been working on an important project, of course! So here’s what I did.
Backup the entire machine using MRP over the network to the NAS. I normally use a USB boot device to boot from a MRP Win PE disk to do my images. It took a while but it worked!
Backup my Laptop where I’m playing with Win10TP to an external USB HD using WinPE MRP boot disk.
Tried to restore from the NAS but the WINPE MRP boot disk didn’t have the network drivers for my Laptop’s NIC.
Used my desktop to transfer the .mrimg file from the NAS to the USB Drive. Again took some time but it worked.
Booted my laptop from the WinPE MRP USB HD w/the .mrimg file.
Restored the wife’s laptop image to my laptop then selected the ReDeploy option in MRP and the driver search progressed. When done I rebooted.
MRP ReDeploy found workable drivers for everything and the machine booted looking just like my wife’s machine. I did use the Dell website to check for new drivers and downloaded 3, might as well be up to date.
Problems, yes two.
1. Kept getting an “Error Handle” message on boot (that’s all it said!). Google to the rescue. Went to Programs and Settings and disabled the Accelerator software (apparently my machine doesn’t have it and it has an SSD anyway). Bye Bye error message.
2. Kept getting Low Memory messages. Did a little digging and I had no Page File! The machine does have 4GB but still got the messages. Setup a static 6GB Page file…Bye Bye low memory messages.
A quick check of the wife’s essential programs and all is well! Whew!
Of course the next step … Image the new setup, you didn’t think I’d forget that did you…
So after driving 10 hours yesterday, 4.5 hours today, unpacking etc. It only took me about 8 hours of clock time (a lot spent taking/restoring images) to maintain marital bliss. :rolleyes:
Of course, her new machine is on order at which point I’ll use the Image I took of my Laptop to get back into playing with Win10TP. Her new machine will be built from scratch since it will come with Win 8.1, on the other hand maybe I’ll image the new machine before doing anything (I usually do this anyway) and ReDeploy the Win 7 image to the new machine and see what gives. Sure beats setting it up from scratch and either OS will be getting upgraded to Win 10 soon anyway so I’ll only have one retraining job to do!
As most of you know I’ve been a Macrium Reflect and Imaging supporter for a while this experience only strengthens my commitment to both!.
:cheers:
