New hard drive, reinstall XP?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ian P
  • Start date Start date
I

Ian P

Can I copy my whole hard drive which is now on its last
legs (onto CDR, for instance), and somehow 'paste' the
contents straight onto a brand new one, thus saving all
the hassle of reinstalling XP, settings and all? If so,
is there anywhere that tells me how to go about it,
please?

Thanks

Ian
 
NO! You will need to use a "disk imaging" software. Some hard drive
manufacturer provides a "free" version of such a program. Or, you can get
Norton Ghost and then copy (clone) the old hard drive.

Y.
 
The new hard drive should come with a utilities disk (or CD drive) which
will enable you to do this.,

Check the website of the new hard drive manufacturer for detailed
instructions (their FAQ is usually the best place to start) before you get
the drive and you'll be well prepared.

Cari
www.coribright.com
 
I agree with the other replies, a simple copy will not work. If you buy a
retail hard dirve (boxed), it should come with software to do the cloning.
It will also come with software to prepare the new disk (i.e., FDISK and
FORMAT, but in a friendly fashion). As alaways, do not actually use what is
in the box, but download the latest version thereof from the hard drive
manufacturer's website.

Back to the cloning software: that will copy every bit of information from
the old drive to the new one, except for things like master boot records,
which is OK 99% of the time. (A very, very few programs like Turbo Tax 2002
use the boot record to store icensing information, so if you change the
drive, they may not work anymore.)

You will have to carefully follow the instruction about master and slave
jumpers. It is not hard, but pay attention to the instructions. And, do
not try to boot into XP until you have disconnected the old drive, and
connected the new drive to the old drive cable and made the new drive the
master. Having two masters or none will confuse the PC.

It is theoretically possible that the new drive may be sufficiently
different that XP will not boot, but instead will produce a blue screen of
death. If so, do not worry. Take the XP CDROM and do a "repair"
installation. That will force appropriate drivers to be loaded for the
hard drive.

If you do not have an XP CDROM, think about whether you should let a PC shop
handle this operation. Upgrading hard drives, including cloning the disk,
is very easy for any PC shop ot repair center. Further, they often charge
little, if you buy the new disk from them.

A couple of other fine points: (1) If the new drive is ATA/100 or 133, it
must use an 80-pin cable, or XP will complain and/or refuse to use it. Such
a cable usually somes with the hard drive. (2) Ty to determine your BIOS
limit for hard drive size. Popular limits for modern PCs are 32 Gig and 127
Gig. Do not attempt to attachel a drive large than your BIOS limit to your
motherboard, as it may not work correctly. Instead, either upgrade the BIOS
(if possible) or get a PCI adapter card that handles ATA/100 or 133 disks,
and has its own BIOS.
 
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