DescentBB

My system drive is about to flake out. It's making funny noises, and the system stalls when it does this. I suspect the drive is about to fail catastrophically.

I've ordered a 200GB replacement for the sad 80 Gigger, but it's a long time since I tried to migrate an operating system to a new drive.

What's the best (easiest!) method to migrate XP to this new disk? Thanks.

* fdisk/mbr
* fdisk - delete all partitions
* setup CD w/XP installer
* VOILA! XP Is on a new disk!

Really bro, why not just install a fresh copy and get rid of all the hidden gremlins?

Um, because my XP install is documented (I'm anal about that sort of thing ) and it extends over 11 pages of notes, over 300 processes and takes over 28 hours to complete.

This plus the fact that XP is running just fine on my system: if it aint broke, don't fix it.

Mobius wrote:if it aint broke, don't fix it.

Amen bro, sorry I can't help.

Use a drive copy program like Drive Image or Norton's Ghost.

i,av used acronis true image and migrate easy to some success, they sometimes leave out the pagefile thought so you may have to manually create one

Ghost worked fine for me when I swapped my 80GB for a 180GB...

dd from a knoppix disk.

... just make sure to unset write permissions on yer dying HD.

Mobi, after you install, patch, load apps, and upgrade everything..why don't you Ghost/image it right then? Before you start putting data on the drive. This way, you can always reload a clean, prepared OS if that latest shareware program or hardware driver you tried screws you over. You can make backups onto DVD, and if there's ever a problem with your machine, just wipe and restore. Even better if you keep your data on a dedicated fileserver.

If it ain't broke...fix it til it is.

Maxtor, Seagate and WD drives (don't know about others, havn't used them) all have their own Utilities (usually come w/ the drive, or DL from the web) that make this painless.. you just hook up the new drive, boot w/ the utility disk and follow the instructions- they format the new drive and then move the old partition to the new drive. Very simple. Very free. Maxtor's is called MaxBlast, can't remember the names for the others.

Mobius wrote:Um, because my XP install is documented (I'm anal about that sort of thing ) and it extends over 11 pages of notes, over 300 processes and takes over 28 hours to complete.

It's what? O_o

He documented all the steps and everything he installed. If you take any type of IT classes where you must install software and play with settings, you'll learn to document everything.

Mobius,

I've done this already, and it was by far the biggest pain in the @$$ I've ever had to deal with on my PC. Maybe I did everything wrong, but here's my story:

I wanted to move my XP install from my 60Gb HDD to my spankin-new 120Gb high speed drive along with all of my directories and files on that drive intact. I mean really, you'd have to re-install everything otherwise. I'll tell you from my experience, disk imaging software will *not* work the way you hope. Programs like Ghost will image the drive just fine, but XP does not like it at all.

After much banging of the head on the keyboard and research on the internet, I discovered that XP knows what the drive "number" is, and possibly the size, of the drive it was installed on to. This is to prevent someone from doing a complete system install with programs and drivers on a HDD and then repetetively copying it onto other HDD's, sort of an assembly line or rubber stamp operating system. When you copy it over to another drive, it looks at the information on that drive and will not let you get past the "login" screen, it simply freezes right there, before the names come up.

The workaround I read was that you can find software that will change the drive letters/numbers (like Maxtor 60Y0L0) to whatever you want, the object being to make them the same as the drive you moved XP from. I never found the software.

There is a way to "move" XP, you can find the option on your XP install disk, but I forget why I didn't use that option. In the end, I wound up Ghosting my drive onto the new one and doing a installation repair with my CD. It was definitely not what I wanted and I had a lot of bugs to work out afterwards, like updating the drivers that the repair overwrote and re-installing the SP1, etc...


I'm sure you've alredy looked, but looking around on google, I found this article:

http://michaelstevenstech.com/moving_xp.html#4

There are plenty more stories out there of people saying to just use imaging software to copy XP, but it didn't work for me. If anyone else has something that does work, I'm interested in hearing it too. Good Luck!

EDIT: O yeah, forgot to mention: If you don't already know it, you should never boot up with 2 XP OS's in your PC, i.e. one on IDE1 and the other on another. It'll really mess things up. I got a USB 2.0 HDD enclosure, made sure that USB boot was disabled in the CMOS, and copied my drives that way.

zapp wrote:Maxtor, Seagate and WD drives (don't know about others, havn't used them) all have their own Utilities (usually come w/ the drive, or DL from the web) that make this painless.. you just hook up the new drive, boot w/ the utility disk and follow the instructions- they format the new drive and then move the old partition to the new drive. Very simple. Very free. Maxtor's is called MaxBlast, can't remember the names for the others.

Yep, this is what I did when I swapped a Fireball out for a much faster drive. Put the new drive in (as a slave), use MaxBlast and say you want to create a new system drive, point it at your old drive, and it handles the copying and system changes (for using the new drive to boot), and all you need to do is remove the old drive and switch the new drive in as master.

Very painless process. (No experience with other makers' software, but I would hope that they would have the same ability.)