I assumed that you meant "partition" since WinXP names
other partitions "Local Disks". But since you meant hard
drive, then my reply is that moving WinXP from drive to drive
is a piece of cake - I do it regularly and frequently with the
use of a 3rd party cloning utility called "Drive Image". When
I bought Drive Image 7, it was a product by PowerQuest.
With the buyout of PowerQuest by Symantec, it's now called
"Ghost 9.0". And, as I mentioned above, the clones boot up
quite nicely and function quite well (as a matter of fact, they
function *identically* to the original). The procedure is to install
Ghost 9.0 (né Drive Image) along with MS .NET Framework,
and then start up Drive Image. In the dialog box, tell it to copy
a hard drive and tell it the source drive and the destination drive.
For the destination, you can tell it to put the copy into "unallocated
space", and it will put the copied info into unformatted space
on the destianation drive. Also tell Drive Image to mark the
destination partition "active" if you want it its copy of ntldr and
boot.ini files to be used in the boot process, and to copy over
the Master Boot Record ("MBR") if the destination hard drive
doesn't have one already. Then tell Drive Image to Start.
After the copying is complete (about 4GB/min), shut down
the computer and use one of the optional ways of starting up the
clone for the 1st time in isolation from the original. The simplest
way is to just disconnect the original HD. That puts the clone HD
at the head of the boot sequence (if there were only 2 HDs), and
it makes the original invisible. Another way is to take the trouble
to substitute the clone HD in place of the original HD and
change the jumpers so the clone HD is Master (not really needed).
Another way, which *I* do, since I've put the HDs' power on
toggle switches, is to merely throw the switch for the original
HD's power to OFF. (Be sure the PC is shut down when you
throw the switch OFF or ON, though.)
With the original WinXP thus invisible to the clone WinXP,
the clone can be started up without it forming links to system files
in the original OS which would make it permanently dependent
on the presence of the original OS to function. Once the clone
WinXP has been successfully started without its "parent" visible,
it becomes an independent "adult" OS, and it can thereafter be
started up with its "parent" OS visible to it without any problems.
You can even put multiple clones on another HD as I do to
make quickly restorable (i.e. bootable) milestone copies of your
WinXP OS. Since a bootable OS must reside on a primary
partition, you can put up to 4 bootable copies on a HD, and
you can load any one of them using the boot menu taken from
the boot.ini file of whichever partition is marked "active" on the
HD which is at the head of the BIOS's boot sequence.
I should add that each clone that loads calls its file system root
"C:", and it renames all the other partitions "D:", "E:", "F:", etc.,
so you have to check with Disk Management to be sure you have
the entries in the boot.ini file referring to the right partitions. It helps
to identify the clone that is loaded by having a distinctive back-
ground for the Desktop on each clone or having a folder with a
name which reflects the "birthdate" of the clone.
By following these procedures, you can have many clones on
many hard drives, and by manipulating the boot sequence (to
select the HD) and by setting the "active" flag (to select the
boot.ini file), and by setting the parameters in the boot.ini file
(to select the partition to load from), you can select whichever
clone to run that you want.
As for partition naming, my observation has been that
physical hard drives are named "Disk 0", "Disk 1", "Disk 2",
etc. by Disk Management, and partitions are named
"Local Drive(C
", "Local Drive(D
", "Local Drive(E
" which
correspond with the letters naming the root of the file system
in each partition. Since (in my observation) the running OS
always calls itself "C:", all path references to files within the
system's partition always begin with "C:" and are always correct.
If a path were to begin with a reference to another partition,
however, the name of the root might be "D:" when the partition
meant had been renamed "E:" by the running OS. The solution
to that might be to use Disk Management to change the name
of the partition (such as a data partition) that is usualy pathed
as "D:" to be called "D:". Thus all shortcuts referring to files
in that data partition would remain correct. Whether this explicit
naming would persist from load to load, though, I don't know.
If not, right there is an argument for putting everything in one
big partition.
*TimDaniels*
