Move Windows XP to bigger drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter Trilux
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Trilux

OK gang, I asked the same question on MS's forum & was told there are limits
to what ppl can write on a proprietary forum, therefore I'd get better
responses here.

I'm moving XP Pro from an 80Gb to a 250 Gb drive but don't want to reinstall
everything again--too many small utilities & settings. Old drive had 2
Partitions: C: of 15Gb, D: the rest. New drive will be C: 20Gb, D: 130 Gb,
E: the rest

Tried "Copy" and "Xcopy" with all the appropriate switches to copy hidden
and subdirectories... no go. Got a "sharing violation."

Tried Win's own "File Transfer." Transfers files and OS allright, but not
all the other installed software--not even MS Office.

Tried Windows Backup and Restoring to new drive AFTER I had installed the OS
on new drive. Nothing.

Tried using (Can't recall the exact name something like System Restore that
creates a Backup file & diskette). It erased ALL data on my original C: to
put it in the new C: but unusable. Luckily, I could put everything back in
the original C--whew!

Tried with WD's latest "Copy to new drive" and then eventually "Repair." A
big nada.

Finally had a friend loan me his Norton Systemworks 2004. Got a whole lot of
garbage. No transfer of installed software.

At this point, I decided to ask the experts. Surely, someone has done it
before. How can I go about it?

Thanks.

Ah, BTW... noticed lots of ppl have the bad habit of writing BELOW the
question. Please write ABOVE my text (or cut it). I already know the
question. Thanks again.
 
Trilux said:
Ah, BTW... noticed lots of ppl have the bad habit of writing BELOW the
question. Please write ABOVE my text (or cut it). I already know the
question. Thanks again.
Click to expand...

People write where they feel...

Anyway, while I haven't tried it on XP, I HAVE had it fail on occasion when
I was trying to use XCOPY32 to move 98SE from one drive to another under
some circumstances.

But, I've never had it fail if all the following conditions were met.

I use 'Start' then 'run' and manually type in the XCOPY32 command
line from the run box. Running from the 'start' 'run' box seemed to be
'different' that running it other ways.

I set the flag to ignore errors so it gets by the swap file. There were
other
flags I had to set, but I can't recall them right now.

I had PREVIOUSLY mounted the drive as 'virgin', used FDISK and
then format and then installed a 'bare' version of WIN98SE. This would
also get the partition active flag set for me. While I sometimes could
just
take any mounted drive then move it to drive "C" and set the partition
active flag with my own utility, I sometimes had problems with WIN98.
By just mounting and doing a 'bare install' first it seemed to reliably
solve
the problem.
 
Ah, BTW... noticed lots of ppl have the bad habit of writing BELOW the
question. Please write ABOVE my text (or cut it). I already know the
question. Thanks again.
Click to expand...
You have it backwards, buddy. What you want is for people to do what
is known as top posting. For ages that has been a no-no on Usenet.

The Q&A here is not just for your benefit, but for others who may have
not caught your original post.

Personally, I killfile all who make it a habit of top posting.
 
Trilux said:
OK gang, I asked the same question on MS's forum & was told there are
limits to what ppl can write on a proprietary forum, therefore I'd get
better responses here.

I'm moving XP Pro from an 80Gb to a 250 Gb drive but don't want to
reinstall everything again--too many small utilities & settings. Old drive
had 2 Partitions: C: of 15Gb, D: the rest. New drive will be C: 20Gb, D:
130 Gb, E: the rest

Tried "Copy" and "Xcopy" with all the appropriate switches to copy hidden
and subdirectories... no go. Got a "sharing violation."

Tried Win's own "File Transfer." Transfers files and OS allright, but not
all the other installed software--not even MS Office.

Tried Windows Backup and Restoring to new drive AFTER I had installed the
OS on new drive. Nothing.

Tried using (Can't recall the exact name something like System Restore
that creates a Backup file & diskette). It erased ALL data on my original
C: to put it in the new C: but unusable. Luckily, I could put everything
back in the original C--whew!

Tried with WD's latest "Copy to new drive" and then eventually "Repair." A
big nada.

Finally had a friend loan me his Norton Systemworks 2004. Got a whole lot
of garbage. No transfer of installed software.

At this point, I decided to ask the experts. Surely, someone has done it
before. How can I go about it?

Thanks.

Ah, BTW... noticed lots of ppl have the bad habit of writing BELOW the
question. Please write ABOVE my text (or cut it). I already know the
question. Thanks again.
Click to expand...

Nobody else does though.

Try Ghost. You'll have to reactivate. Don't know why this would be an
issue for the Microsoft groups. It's a fairly common procedure.
 
I'm moving XP Pro from an 80Gb to a 250 Gb drive but don't want to reinstall
everything again
Click to expand...

Simply use software that will copy the software image on the old drive
to the new drive: Partition Magic, Drive Image, or something similar.
I have also used the Maxtor MaxBlast utility included with Maxtor
drives to do this successfully. Be sure to boot off of a CD or floppy
disk instead of the target to be copied. Also be sure that only the
new hard drive is hooked up when booting XP for the first time off the
new drive: it will get confused with 2 copies of XP present. You
should not have XP activation issues if the only component replaced is
the hard drive.

- -
Gary L.
Reply to the newsgroup only
 
Ah, BTW... noticed lots of ppl have the bad habit of writing BELOW the
question. Please write ABOVE my text (or cut it). I already know the
question. Thanks again.
Click to expand...

Can I answer with my sign?
 
J. Clarke said:
Try Ghost. You'll have to reactivate. Don't know why
this would be an issue for the Microsoft groups. It's a
fairly common procedure.
Click to expand...


Yes, "common as mud" as they say in Jamaica.
But you would not *bullleeeeve* the ranting and
railing from the Microsoft MVPs and other MS
shills when I proposed that people could multiboot
a single copy of WinXP for personal use (i.e. non-
commercial) IN THE SAME MACHINE!! I was
called a "software pirate" and an unethical scumbag
(all true, by the way) for violation of MS's EULA against
making multiple copies of WinXP if I had only a single
license. Obviously, multiple copies of anything by
Microsoft is a *very* hot button for MS and its shills
and no amount of reason would make them view OS
cloning for personal use in the same machine to be
seen as anything other than vile thievery. That's
probably why I like it so much. :-)

*TimDaniels*
 
Timothy Daniels said:
Yes, "common as mud" as they say in Jamaica.
But you would not *bullleeeeve* the ranting and
railing from the Microsoft MVPs and other MS
shills when I proposed that people could multiboot
a single copy of WinXP for personal use (i.e. non-
commercial) IN THE SAME MACHINE!! I was
called a "software pirate" and an unethical scumbag
(all true, by the way) for violation of MS's EULA against
making multiple copies of WinXP if I had only a single
license. Obviously, multiple copies of anything by
Microsoft is a *very* hot button for MS and its shills
and no amount of reason would make them view OS
cloning for personal use in the same machine to be
seen as anything other than vile thievery. That's
probably why I like it so much. :-)
Click to expand...


I should clarify that out of fairness to Mother Microsoft.
The MS shills were demanding that after cloning, the
cloned HD should be reformatted so as to destroy the
old copy of the OS. Cloning was not the issue - it was
having multiple copies that was the issue. That is the
evil that lurks in the hearts and minds of men.
<Hee, hee>

*TimDaniels*
 
Trilux said:
I'm moving XP Pro from an 80Gb to a 250 Gb drive but
don't want to reinstall everything again--too many small
utilities & settings. Old drive had 2 Partitions: C: of 15Gb,
D: the rest. New drive will be C: 20Gb, D: 130 Gb, E: the rest

Tried "Copy" and "Xcopy" with all the appropriate switches
to copy hidden and subdirectories... no go. Got a "sharing
violation."
Click to expand...


Did you try xxClone? (Note the double x's.) It's designed
specifically for cloning, a simplified version of xxCopy - although
xxCopy is supposed to be able to do a clone as well. You can
get xxClone from www.xxClone.com . (No, I haven't tried it.)
If you're curious about xxCopy, check out www.xxCopy.com .

The usual way to do cloning (which you can also do to archive
copies of the entire system in one fell swoop) is to use a specialized
cloning utility such as Norton Ghost (which now as v. 9.0 incorporates
PowerQuest's Drive Image). Tell the utility to put the contents of the
old hard drive into a "primary" partition on the new hard drive and
to copy the MBR (Master Boot Record) - both necessary for it to
be bootable. Once this is done, everything - the entire OS and any
data in the same partition - will be on the new hard drive and you
can reformat the old hard drive and use it as a backup medium or
for extra storage.

If you think you might want to use the old OS as a backup OS in the
event the new hard drive crashes, don't reformat the old hard drive.
Just prepare the new OS for booting by booting it for the 1st time in
isolation from the old OS. If the new OS sees the old OS during its
1st boot-up, the new OS will have some pointers set to point back to
the old OS and the new OS will thereafter depend on the continued
presence of the old OS. To prevent that, just disconnect the old hard
drive and put the new hard drive in its place when you boot the new one
for the 1st time. It really doesn't matter which hard drive is Master or
Slave, but it keeps you having to adjust the BIOS' boot sequence if you
jumper the new hard drive to be the same as the jumpering had been
for the old hard drive (presumably Master) and jumper the old hard drive
to be the opposite. Otherwise, if you use Cable Select mode, you can
bypass Master/Slave jumpering altogether and just use the position on
the IDE ribbon cable to determine Master and Slave. After the new hard
drive boots up for the 1st time, subsequent boots can have the new OS
see the old OS without a problem.

When the new hard drive boots up, the new OS will be on the "C:"
drive, and the old hard drive will just be given a name such as
"Local Disk (E:)", and you can drag 'n drop files between the drives.
If you want to boot the old OS, just add an entry in the new OS's boot.ini
file (at C:\boot.ini) which points to it. Assuming the old OS is on the 1st
partition of the old drive, and the old drive is 2nd in the BIOS' boot
sequence, that is in relative position "1" to the start of the boot sequence
(all of which are probable), just use Notepad to add the line:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Old WinXP system" /fastdetect

as the last line to the existing boot.ini file which probably looks
something like this:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="New WinXP system" /fastdetect


In the above file, the text between the quotes is purely arbitrary,
and you can set it to whatever you think makes sense to you. And
you can set the 'timeout=' value to whatever number of seconds
you want to have to make up your mind about which OS to boot.
Thereafter, when the new hard drive's boot manager activates at
boot time, it will list the two boot.ini file entries, and you can select
which OS boots up - the new WinXP or the old WinXP. *And* you
can still use the old hard drive to save files.

In your situation with multiple partitions, you probably would
have to copy each partition individually as the cloning utility sees
each partition as a "drive". Since the other partitions don't have
to be bootable, you may not have to use primary partitions for them.
But they would have to be given the same letter names that they
had in the old HD if there are any references to them in the OS
files. Cloning a multiple partition system isn't discussed very often
here, so let us know how it went when you get your multi-partition
system finally cloned.

*TimDaniels*
 
Fist check if you have Bios support for disks >137GB. Also check if you have
Windows XP SP1 (or SP2) installed. Change EnableBigLba to 1 (DWORD) in the
following registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Atapi\Parameters\

You seem to be familiar with WinXP, so it should be obvious to use: BartPE
and Ghost32.exe. After successful disk duplication DO NOT BOOT Windows from
your primary disk. Turn off PC, remove primary hard disk, put a disk you
copied to as a master. Then restart your PC.
 
--
A: People bitching about top posting
Q: What's the most annoying thing on USENET?
 
Norton Ghost. I've done this many times, at least twenty, and Ghost has
never failed. The process is absurdly simple. Prepare a Ghost diskette, boot
to it, clone your disk, done, clear?
 
I've had success with Partition Magic 8. You can use Windows GUI program to
start the copying.
After you install the clean drive, go to Disk Manager (My Computer/Right
click/ Manage), and you'll need to "initialize" the drive. I don't remember
the exact words, but what it does it writes MBR on it. DON'T create a
partition on it, or it will screw up your OS clone.

Start Partition Magic and specify "Copy Partition" from original drive to
the new drive. You will have to reboot the computer. On boot, PM will run in
(pseudo) console mode, as a boot time app (like CHKDSK runs). When it's
done, connect your new drive as a boot drive, DISCONNECT your original
system drive and boot the computer. If you want to use your original drive,
connect it only after successful boot and shutdown.

Since the partition copy will have the same size as the original partition,
you'll have to open Disk Manager and expand the partition.

Don't use DOS mode PM, because it will probably work in PIO mode and the
copying would take forever.

Make sure to install at least SP1 before trying to copy the drive.
 
Well, got many more suggestions than expected, thank you very much. Will try
a few & let you know.

Yes, of course I already have SP installed and my BIOS does recognize the
larger drive.
 
OK gang, I asked the same question on MS's forum & was told there are limits
to what ppl can write on a proprietary forum, therefore I'd get better
responses here.

I'm moving XP Pro from an 80Gb to a 250 Gb drive but don't want to reinstall
everything again--too many small utilities & settings. Old drive had 2
Partitions: C: of 15Gb, D: the rest. New drive will be C: 20Gb, D: 130 Gb,
E: the rest

Tried "Copy" and "Xcopy" with all the appropriate switches to copy hidden
and subdirectories... no go. Got a "sharing violation."

Tried Win's own "File Transfer." Transfers files and OS allright, but not
all the other installed software--not even MS Office.

Tried Windows Backup and Restoring to new drive AFTER I had installed the OS
on new drive. Nothing.

Tried using (Can't recall the exact name something like System Restore that
creates a Backup file & diskette). It erased ALL data on my original C: to
put it in the new C: but unusable. Luckily, I could put everything back in
the original C--whew!

Tried with WD's latest "Copy to new drive" and then eventually "Repair." A
big nada.

Finally had a friend loan me his Norton Systemworks 2004. Got a whole lot of
garbage. No transfer of installed software.

At this point, I decided to ask the experts. Surely, someone has done it
before. How can I go about it?

Thanks.

Ah, BTW... noticed lots of ppl have the bad habit of writing BELOW the
question. Please write ABOVE my text (or cut it). I already know the
question. Thanks again.
Click to expand...

DriveImage, Ghost (these may be a single product now?), xxcopy
(freeware).

XXcopy may require remaking the MBR, not a big deal.
 
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