Able to Do Full Windows Restore to Larger Drive?

[plb]

I have a PC running Windows XP Pro and Retrospect 6.0 Professional. The 14GB hard drive (FAT32) is starting to fail. I want to install a new Western Digital Drive - probably their 40 GB drive (to be formatted NTFS). So, new drive is much larger than current drive and NTFS instead of FAT32.

 

I have a full backup of the current system including the Windows registry and a Disaster Recovery CD. Will this DR CD and backup set work to properly reinstall Windows XP, the registry, and all applications? Is the larger hard drive with different format transparent to this process?

 

Thanks.

[jelenko]

No question you can restore your current system backup to a larger drive. [You can also restore to a smaller drive] Should be no problem to restore to NTFS. This is the beauty of Retrospect - it's 'simply' a file by file backup - not an image. Retrospect just doesn't care what the size of the drive is - as long as it's enough to hold the restore.

 

Essentially, all Retrospect DR does is install a min OS + min Retrospect, then restore all the files from the full system backup.

[plb]

Hi Jelenko,

 

Thanks for your response. Makes sense. One question: Part of the restoral would be the registry. I'm no expert on the registry. Does the registry "care" about disk size? That is, would the restored registry have any incompatibilities with the new differently-sized hard drive?

 

Thanks,

Pete

[jelenko]

As far as I know, the registry does not care at all about the size of the drive. I've restored systems that were originally on 40GB drives to 10GB drives and vice versa.