I like to upgrade my computer about every 3 years, but the huge inconvenience of re-installing everything keeps me from doing it until I'm driven to it.For example, all of the add-ons for Flight Simulator, patches,and fine-tuning has taken a lot of time to get the way I like. RC4, FSPassengers, FSbuild, FSNavigator, FSKeeper, Active Sky 6, PMDG 737, PSS Airbuses, Cessna Citation, and so on...plus all of the other applications that I accumulate over a 3 year period. I know that re-installing programs on a fresh hard drive is a smart thing to do in order to "clean up" the drive and registry. But I dread the hours it takes to put all of the these programs back on a new computer.Is there any other way? Is there a way to just "dump" my old hard drive onto a new hard drive so that everything is set up exactly the same way on the new computer, registry and everything? (I'm asking this question on this forum because I think that some of you with a perfectly tuned FS9 system may have tried something.)Thanks for any opinions and ideas.

imhoreinstall everything.jd

>I know that re-installing programs on a fresh hard drive is a>smart thing to do in order to "clean up" the drive and>registry. But I dread the hours it takes to put all of the>these programs back on a new computer.One thing that I have done as a matter of routine practice is to write down the steps in building my system so that I can efficiently rebuild if necessary. Yes, it would take hours - usually about 8 for me - but writing things down at least allows you to streamline the process as much as possible.>Is there any other way? Is there a way to just "dump" my old>hard drive onto a new hard drive so that everything is set up>exactly the same way on the new computer, registry and>everything? Yes. The above method, while it works, is extremely time consuming. And, more importantly, I wanted to be sure I was protected in the event of a hardware failure, etc. There are software packages that allow you to make a binary-level copy of the hard drive, and to save that "image" in a compressed form. In this way, you can easily move your entire system from one hard drive to another, or, move from one system to another. The catch however, is that since the complete system state is preserved, the drivers for your low-level hardware and devices are also saved. Therefore, if you were to migrate from an Intel chipset to a Via chipset, you would have problems.But - again, not unsurmountable problems. There are plenty of Internet resource sites where they provide step-by-step instructions for easily moving your current system to a new system without the need for a re-install of all the programs and data. The key is to uninstall the special device drivers just before you migrate and to let the generic drivers get installed during boot-up. So - the simple answer is Yes - there is a way. But, it requires you to acquire some software (which is good to have anyway because it give you easy backup capability), and requires you to do some research.The two packages I use are Partition Magic and Drive Image. Partition Magic provides the means to "partition" or subdivide your hard drive into multiple physical or logical drives. I actually keep a primary boot and back up boot partition so that should anything go wrong, I have a means to get the drive booted, and then can take action to remedy any corrupt portions.Drive Image make a compressed image of the entire drive contents. You can restore individual files, folders, or the entire image. Restoring the entire image allows you to recovery from corrupted disks. This tool has saved me on many occasions when bad or corrupt device drivers hosed my system to the point that it was unbootable. I just boot from floppy, restore a saved image, and nothing is lost.Partion Magic and Drive Image were developed by PowerQuest. They have since been acquired by Symantec (who also acquired Norton). Symantec still markets the Partition Magic product under the same name. Drive Image is now sold as Norton Ghost.Finally, I have adopted the practice where I routinely "image" each of my systems once a week. I save the images on the host system and then copy it to off-line storage - just in case! ;-)-michael

Unfortunately, the only way to really clean a system is to do a full reinstall of everything. There are programs available that will create an image of your existing drive but you will also be carrying forward whatever problems are there now. Once that image of the old drive is loaded onto a reformatted drive, or a new drive, the same old problems will still be there, e.g., Registry issues, Windows folder bloat, driver issues, etc. My experience has been that takes far less time to just redo it all than it does to try and patch around the problem(s) that time seems to bring.Doug

Thanks for your opinions. I appreciate all of them.

> Unfortunately, the only way to really clean a system is>to do a full reinstall of everything. Absolutely. However, the question was not the best way to clean a system, the question was regarding options to prevent having to resinstall everything when upgrading an existing system.I only cited the ability to recover using the same mechanisms that allow you to easily migrate from one set of h/w to another as an additional benefit. If you are diligent in managing your system then there is no need to do a complete reinstall of that in which the integrity of the installation is already established and preserved.And in that regard, I also maintain an image of the initial clean OS install without any apps (just updated drivers, etc). That way, should I need to "start over" I do not have to go through the entire OS installation, updating latest drivers etc., etc. -michael

Michael, yes I agree with you and everyone else about a full reinstall.But you gave me the answer to my question. I think I'll get Norton Ghost, one of your recommendations, if only to back up the system from time to time. I have NOT kept good notes on my installations, upgrades and patches. However, I do good housekeeping with regard to virus scans, spyware scans, registry cleaning, defrags, etc. When I get ready to upgrade this machine in a few months, that's when I'll decide on the method to use for installation. By the way,if I wanted to do a full-reinstall on all applications, EXCEPT FS9 and all of the addons, would I be able to do that with Norton Ghost?Bill

>By the way,if I wanted to do a full-reinstall on all>applications, EXCEPT FS9 and all of the addons, would I be>able to do that with Norton Ghost?>>BillNo. You either reload the entire disk image or you selectively recover individuals folders and files. But, there is no capability to reload individual applications/programs (to include their individual registry settings, etc).Edit: However (there always is a however!) ... ;-)What you could do is this. Before you migrate to your new system, you first image the entire disk. Then, you can uninstall FS and all your add-ons. Then, image the entire disk again. Now, you have the option to reload the entire disk image with FS/addons, or reload the entire disk image minus FS/addons.-michael

byt the time you get everything right, after imaging, and restoring, and finding all the missing registry entries, and missing dll's....you will have spent more time than installing the os, and then all of your appsjust my opinion, your mileage may varyjd

I predict that within 5 years there will be a much easier way to populate a new system with applications from the old computer and it will be neat and clean. It is such a pain in the neck to get a new computer up and running that, at least for me, it's reason to delay getting a new machine for as long as possible. I have an 80G drive, only half full, but I still dread the boring work of getting a new system going. Wouldn't sales of computers increase if it was as easy as plugging two machines together and "dumping"? I think we're going to look back one day and say "do you remember when we actually had to re-install applications whenever we bought a new computer".Oh well...