Cloning a laptop?
Discussion
I'll try to keep this as brief as possible.
On Monday last, I foolishly left an almost new Lenovo laptop underneath the passenger seat of a rental car that I had returned.
Rental company said it had not been retrieved and the car has been re-rented for a week. They contacted the renter - no sign of my laptop.
Today the rental company says "Yes, we have your laptop - come and get it." I drive over to their lost and found and they produce an old clunker of a Dell computer. I tell them it's not mine and leave.
Just got a call back from the rental company saying that when they fire-up this Dell computer, it had my profile on the start-up screen. I asked them to enter my password and the thing launched and opened my desktop.
Question - is it possible to clone the contents of my Lenovo in it's entirety and place it on an older beat-up Dell? Would it be worth it even?
On Monday last, I foolishly left an almost new Lenovo laptop underneath the passenger seat of a rental car that I had returned.
Rental company said it had not been retrieved and the car has been re-rented for a week. They contacted the renter - no sign of my laptop.
Today the rental company says "Yes, we have your laptop - come and get it." I drive over to their lost and found and they produce an old clunker of a Dell computer. I tell them it's not mine and leave.
Just got a call back from the rental company saying that when they fire-up this Dell computer, it had my profile on the start-up screen. I asked them to enter my password and the thing launched and opened my desktop.
Question - is it possible to clone the contents of my Lenovo in it's entirety and place it on an older beat-up Dell? Would it be worth it even?
tbox for the hire company to find and give back to you?Matt Harper said:
Just seems to me like a massive amount of fanny-around for not much gain<snip>.
On the average laptop, it takes less than 5 minutes to swap out the hard drive.Cloning it (especially if not SSD) will take several hours.
So the thief gained themselves a (potentially) better laptop for 5 minutes work.
Coin Slot. said:
I'm no IT geek, but you can't just clone a drive and then plug it into a laptop with different hardware and expect it to all boot up can you?
With Windows 7 and later, hardware support is really good.Also - a lot of laptops share a common hardware platform / chipset (usually Intel) so on boot up the drivers are usually there, but all drivers just have to be re-detected and re-installed.
I used to do this all the time when I cloned PCs at work, even across different makes and models (usually with a PC it's the graphics card that's always different).
TonyRPH said:
With Windows 7 and later, hardware support is really good.
Also - a lot of laptops share a common hardware platform / chipset (usually Intel) so on boot up the drivers are usually there, but all drivers just have to be re-detected and re-installed.
I used to do this all the time when I cloned PCs at work, even across different makes and models (usually with a PC it's the graphics card that's always different).
Ahh, didn't know that, back in the old Ghost days it wasn't quite so simple from memory.Also - a lot of laptops share a common hardware platform / chipset (usually Intel) so on boot up the drivers are usually there, but all drivers just have to be re-detected and re-installed.
I used to do this all the time when I cloned PCs at work, even across different makes and models (usually with a PC it's the graphics card that's always different).
Coin Slot. said:
Ahh, didn't know that, back in the old Ghost days it wasn't quite so simple from memory.
I did it with the same XP desktop hard drive twice. The third reincarnation of the machine wasn't as stable as the other two...I also virtualised a Server 2000 machine by cloning its data as a VHD and sticking it into Hyper-V. Worked very well!
TonyRPH said:
With Windows 7 and later, hardware support is really good.
Still not good enough to work reliably, though. Unless you specifically build the O/S with a driver set that permits it to be compatible with a large range of devices, it's still a nightmare to even get them to boot reliably after swapping the disk into something else.Especially bad on desktops. If you keep them "in the family" (IE from the same manufacture and rough era) you can sometimes do it with laptops and have a certain degree of success.
Coin Slot. said:
I'm no IT geek, but you can't just clone a drive and then plug it into a laptop with different hardware and expect it to all boot up can you?
Yes it's not the 90sIt won't be happy 100% of the time, but more often than not it will be at least mostly functional.
Unless it's encrypted which is unfortunately still very often not the case
Well I might be missing something here but someone reclaiming lost property is going to notice that his brand new Lenovo has magically turned itself into a beat up Dell. Rather than go to that much trouble to clone it, surely the offender would be better off just nicking it and pretending they know nothing about it???
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