new comp boot up

[robert heywood]

hi all, i have just biught a new pc with no operating system, i backed up my old pc's os on to an external hard drive, well a full back up of every thing on pc, is it possible to to boot up new pc from the externall hard drive and transfere all the stuff on to it ?
bit of a numpty when it gets a bit tecnicall like this

[Dingo]

You'll probably have a problem if the new pc has all different components from the old one, particularly in regard to drivers etc and the O\S recognising what essentially might be a new mobo\cpu and drives...

When I have broken down a pc previously and done a rebuild with different components I have always had to reactivate my oem copy of XP

[peterb]

No, not if you have done a straightforward copy, because you have copied the filesystem. Some of the code required to boot windows resides on the hard drive outside the file system (such as the MBR) and therefore won't have been copied unless you use a tool that reads and writes directly to/from the disk (in simple terms) Basically you need to make a logical copy of the drive, not just the filesystem

Assuming you do that, you may still have problems, particularly if you are changing processor architecture (Eg AMD to Intel) or even different series. This is because some of the specific modules/drivers required for the new system components will not be on the old operating system disk. Even if it does run, it may not be running optimally.

Although it is a pain, re-installing the OS on the new system is probably the safest way to go, although that also means re-installing the applications and then transferring your user data across. Making a separate partition (and therefore a second logical drive) for user data can make backing up data a lot easier, and you can also re-install Windows ata later date (if you ever need to) without affecting the data partition.