WindowsPE

I have Macrium Free and I think I can image to a new hard drive but not to a new pc or a new motherboard. I have been reading about Marcum's redeploy feature with the paid version and that led me to WindowsPE and BartPE. If my current Macrium free can image to a new hard drive but not a new motherboard, what do you suggest I look to; WindowsPE or BartPE - or something else to do the job? If I can learn how to image to a new motherboard, now is the time to learn it rather than if the situation occurs.

you talking about restoring an image of an old pc to a new pc with a different motherboard?? if so then no you will not be able to get an image of your older pc to run on a newer pc. images only work on the same pc you made them on. partly because a pc's hardware(motherboard) only communicates with the operating system when the software(drivers) needed are installed along with the operating system and those are including in the image you made. now when you try and use that image on a different pc/motherboard then that means the software/drivers installed with the operating system in the image are no longer the correct ones for the newer hardware so will no longer work. and partly because of restrictions in the windows os itself that stops it from running on any hardware that is not the same that it was originally installed on. and that's why the image you made will only work for that same hardware configuration/motherboard/pc. there is no such thing as imaging a motherboard because a motherboard is just a piece of hardware, so nothing you use will image it for for you. images are just copies of the all the "software" on a pc and have nothing at all to do with "hardware" now of course there are ways to use the old image and get things installed and working on a new pc/old pc with a new motherboard but i believe after doing the restore of the image they usually involve doing a repair install of the os with an os cd/dvd, so you won't lose your data but the os and all new drivers needed to get things up and running again will get re-installed.

after re-reading your post i think what your worried about is if your motherboard failed and needed replacing. in that case what you would do is just replace it. and if the os didn't boot straight up after the replacement, then you'd do a repair install of the os which would install any needed drivers to get things working again without losing any of your data that is already on the hard drive that you haven't changed. after that it's just a case of using macrium as usual to make a new image of your hard drive and getting rid of all your old images with the drivers of the older motherboard in them.

You answered my question. I was reading much too much about what I did not understand in a attempt to place a current image on a new machine. Now that I realize it cannot be done, I do know what to do. Thanks a lot for all of your insightful information. Reading never hurt anyone.