My first update of Windows Vista to Windows Seven was relatively calm, although it took several hours. The ideal is to always do a clean install instead of update, but I did not have time and patience for this, so I opted for the upgrade. A few problems occurred, DAEMON Tools needed to be reinstalled, the program you login with fingerprint stopped working, some drivers had to be upgraded, but it was just that.

The second attempt to update occurred on a desktop with Windows Vista x64 and was less smooth, several problems interrupted the update in half and caused the system to be restored to Vista. After many attempts the update has been completed but the result was a totally unstable x64 Windows 7, showing blue screens of death (blue screen of death, BSOD) frequent. So I opted to do a clean install, but I want to migrate data from old system (user accounts, documents, program settings, etc.). To avoid having to do all over again. For this I was behind the USMT (Windows User State Migration Tool), which I have already spoken in an article here on Skooter Blog .

When searching on the USMT, I realized that he is now at version 4.0 (which I still had was the 3.1), but Microsoft decided to complicate things a bit and does not offer more separate download the tool, you must download Windows Automated Installation Kit (Windows AIK or Windows Automated Installation Kit Windows in Portuguese) , which contains the USMT 4.0 among other tools that facilitate the upgrade of Windows (especially in business or other environments with lots of machines). It is interesting, but download an ISO of up to 1GB can be tricky for those without a decent broadband (ie, 99.9% of Brazilians).

Downloaded and installed the Windows AIK, I could see the main changes the new USMT 4.0: Before you had to use the ScanState still with the old operating system to save the settings in a separate location, update the system and then use LoadState to migrate settings to the new system. Now it's much easier, you can install Windows Seven before saving the settings, it should save the old files in a folder called Windows.old, it is clear that this will only happen if you do not choose to format the partition during the installation. Inside the folder are stored Windows.old the Windows folders, the program files (32 and 64 bit), user profiles, users' folders and everything else you had in your old Windows. Then you can use the ScanState pointing it to that folder and it will prepare the migration, then just use the LoadState to load them into the new system. The intermediate location can now store only hardlinks the files to be migrated, ie, you save a process of read / write files directly from migrating several Windows.old to the new location, and this makes the whole process much quicker. Note that there are two versions of the program: x86 and amd64. If your system is 64 bit you'll amd64, even if your processor is Intel.

But not everything was perfect in the middle of the implementation of LoadState saw that he seemed to be stopped, and HD using the processor, but without leaving your seat. Looking LOG operation realized he was trying to create something inside a temporary folder of my user (which was logged in running the program), and was unable to retry indefinitely. I check that folder and saw that she was more 65,000 files. I do not know if he was running into a limit number of files per folder NTFS (there?) Or some other limit whatsoever, but just in case I decided to delete all temporary (that did not share error) and then the process continued. The paste filling over again and had to delete everything again even before you finish running LoadState, then finally everything went right.

Note that you must specify what will be migrated through XML files. Fortunately the three standard file system features: MigUser.xml, and MigDocs.xml MigApp.xml, which contains settings for a good amount of software (especially Microsoft). Some unfortunately are left out, the administrator can create your own XML files, but this should be quite laborious and not worth for system administrators who will migrate many machines with this same script. For the average user will probably give less work to migrate manually what was missing. To cite just one example: Mozilla Firefox migrated perfectly with USMT 4.0, with its plugins and everything, but Mozilla Thunderbird I had to migrate manually. Fortunately this is simple, just copy the folders C: \ Users \ username \ AppData \ Local \ Thunderbird and C: \ Users \ username \ AppData \ Roaming \ Thunderbird from the old system to the new (or to the local Windows.old cited ).

I conclude that the use of USMT 4.0 is worth it. It is half-way between an upgrade and a clean install, remembering that the installation followed the migration of data with the USMT is still considered a new facility and brings the same benefits from it: registry cleaner, lighter system, etc..

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