Hi all, I have been using a dell d610 laptop with xp professional for some time now and unfortunately have to return it to the owner, but what I would like to do is clone the laptop hard drive (60Gb) to an external USB hard drive (120Gb) and boot from my new PC (XP home sp2) which is capable of booting from USB devices. Is this possible somehow? The problem that I forsee is XP, as the system hardware is not going to match. What do you suggest? Thanks in advance.

Nortong Ghost 10 http://www.symantec.com/home_homeoffice/products/backup_recovery/ghost10/

You could try ghosting it and then without even trying to boot the PC, boot to your XP disk and run a Repair.

if the version of XP on the laptop is OEM (which it will be) then the reinstallation will not work as it will only be valid for that specific hardware. if it were the retail version then you'd be ok. sorry! MSI KT4AV-L AMD Athlon XP 2800 1Gb Crucial 3200 DDR 160Gb Seagate Barracuda ATI 256Mb 9600XT 16x DL DF DVD/RW 16x DVD ROM 9-in-1 Flash Media FDD

Microsoft do not support booting from external drives..................

Thanks for your replies. simon, i've had a closer look at the laptop and the sticker underneath says windows XP home edition but the version currently installed is the professional edition. I strongly suspect that this isn't the OEM version, therefore do you think I might be in luck? I have already tried with Acronis true image but when booting using the PC I get an error message saying something like "operating system not recognised" or "error with the operating system" Do you think Ghost might work? Cheers

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but it will not work. At bootup Windows check its hardware hash composition values against what you have and if it detect a big difference it simply shut down itself. i_XpUser