Upgrading hard drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter Shantel
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Shantel

I got a new larger hard drive than I already have and was
wondering how to transfer my old hard drives contents to
the new one without having to start over and lose
everything? Thank you
 
You do not have to lose everything.. Install XP onto your new hard drive and
run the old drive as a slave.. this will enable you to transfer files across
easily.. then use the slave drive to keep important files and program
download saves..
 
Make an "image" of your old HD and install the new image
on the new one.
Norton's Ghost would work well
Click to expand...

True, that's a great product. PowerQuest's Drive Image 7
is a great product too, but as irony would have it,
Symantec plans to acquire PowerQuest.

Many hard drives include a utility diskette (or download)
to copy the entire disk contents from one drive to
another. Since this happens under control of DOS or a DOS
clone, such a transfer might work, though in my
experience, this works better for Windows 98 (FAT32) than
for Windows XP (NTFS). It is worth a try. If possible,
avoid reinstalling the entire OS unless your current
installation is beyond rescue.
 
I tried doing this with my computer running Win XP and
never got it to work. Yes, I made a perfect copy to the
new hard drive with Norton Ghost. But when I'd put the
new disk drive in as the only drive in the system (with
drive jumpers configured properly) I could never get XP to
boot up all the way. It would start to boot and just lock
up. Thinking this was a problem with the new drive, I
tried it with a second new drive and had the same
problem. I don't know if this is XP's way of keeping you
from copying the operating system or just what it might
be, but I do know that after buying two new hard drives, I
wasn't able to get Win XP to boot from either one.
 
Joe Brannen said:
I tried doing this with my computer running Win XP and
never got it to work. Yes, I made a perfect copy to the
new hard drive with Norton Ghost. But when I'd put the
new disk drive in as the only drive in the system (with
drive jumpers configured properly) I could never get XP to
boot up all the way. It would start to boot and just lock
up. Thinking this was a problem with the new drive, I
tried it with a second new drive and had the same
problem. I don't know if this is XP's way of keeping you
from copying the operating system or just what it might
be, but I do know that after buying two new hard drives, I
wasn't able to get Win XP to boot from either one.
Click to expand...

I think you probably ran into a case of Ghost trying to be too smart for
its own good. I use DriveImage, but in my limited experience with Ghost
I found it, unannounced, altered the boot.ini file on the clone so I no
longer had a perfect clone. The ARCpath in the boot.ini file -- that
"multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(x)" stuff -- is supposed to tell XP
which HDD on which IDE channel that XP is on. I found Ghost "helped
out" by changing that to point to where the clone drive was, but the
help would turn out to be wrong once you swapped the drives and jumpers.
 
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