I decided to move my XP system from Caprica to Serval. Caprica has served me well as an XP system, but I have several reasons to make the change. (1) Caprica has been giving me warnings about disk access. The warnings mainly happen at boot time, but are really inexplicable. I've moved my external drives to Serval and moved all the applications that need them to Serval, too. I had some bat files run at startup that used subst commands to point to different drives, but I disabled all of them in msconfig and removed them from the startup menu. I even made sure I removed all references to these bat files in the registry. So, it might be time to re-format Caprica's hard drive. (2) I just received an e-mail from Tiger Direct about an 8 core processor from AMD for $129. When I got Serval I was aware of a 6 core drive that was plug compatible, but 8 core is twice what Serval came with (quad core). If I double Serval's processing power, I could easily run a virtual XP system on her. (3) ...a bunch of miscellaneous reasons; e.g., I'd like to have a dedicated Unix system in my network. Getting back to (2) I am running a virtual XP system on Serval, now.
I took the XP CD that came with Caprica and created a virtual Windows XP system on Serval. Next I ran the File Transfer Wizard on Caprica and created a USMT2.UNC file on Serval. I ran The file transfer wizard on the virtual XP system and got an error message; WindowsXP (my virtual system) couldn't see the data files (USMT2.UNC is a folder that contains .DAT files). I realized that Caprica is running SP3 and the Windows XP CD is only up to SP1. I copied the transfer file folder from WindowsXP (C:\Windows\system32\usmt) to a flash drive and ran migwiz (migration wizard) on Caprica. The resultant USMT2.UNC file imported into WindowsXP without a hitch.
Most of the executables on Caprica I still need too install on Serval, and if they need data files they'll be able to use the ones I transferred from Caprica. In the case of e-mail, I exported Caprica's e-mail to pst files and imported them to Office 2003 (I still have the CDs I used to install it on Caprica - had too install Office before importing to it). I haven't tried installing other executables yet, that I had on Caprica; e.g., NetBeans (which should be able to use the data files I've transferred from Caprica). One of the executables I plan on installing next is from the Lexmark CD that came with my Lexmark printer; I plan on moving the physical connection of the printer to Serval. ...and, I can't forget magicJack; that completes the transfer of my XP setup to Serval (I'll see if I need to install an 8 core processor at that time, or not).
The main reason for writing this blog is the huge number of posts on the Internet about people being unable to transfer their XP system to another system. If you're going from SP3 to SP1, try what I did in the second paragraph of this blog.