Bare metal reality

[dogberry]

As I understand it, a bare metal restore is claimed to be possible to any machine, not just the machine that was imaged.

It sounds wonderful, but I have always wondered what the user is left with when it comes to serial numbers. I realize that drivers may not be compatible, but the big money is with the validity of the program installations. Won't the software all be rejected as soon as you try to use it when online because it was installed on a different computer?

[JoeP517]

It does not necessarily mean the software won't work. Microsoft software that requires validation will most likely need to be re-validated. That could entail a call to Microsoft. Software from other vendors may need revalidation also but that would depend on the validation method used.

Joe

[Paul T]

The point of a bare metal restore is to return the machine as if it were the original. This gets you around having to re-install everything because of a hardware failure.
Windows is the most likely to complain, but MS are happy to re-validate because of hardware failure. I expect others will have a similar attitude.

cheers, Paul

[Doc Brown]

Bare metal restores work very well. The imaging software that supports bare metal restore to dissimilar hardware has the drivers built in and can stream them to the OS while dropping the image on the target device. However, because of Windows licensing issues and activation, bare metal restores are really intended for enterprise IT shops that are using volume license keys. Even then, its not very practical to keep hundreds or thousands of images of PCs, but instead its used most often for critical servers.

Except for retail off the shelf copies of Windows Home or customers with volume license keys, it is not legal to restore a Windows image to dissimilar hardware. But as Paul stated, if you have a hardware failure and have to replace a component, MS will not have an issue.

[Paul T]

Doc, I have used bare metal restores in the corporate environment for years but have never used them to restore servers. My rule is backup the data and config, and have redundancy. Then you build a new box and restore the data.

cheers, Paul