Moving an XP Pro installation to a new hard drive

[Joshua Beall]

Hi All,

I have a machine that has totally run out of space. It was a mistake in the
first place to have such a small drive in there (4gb), but it was intended
to be only used for web surfing, email, and possibly some MS Office work. I
happened to have all the spare parts on hand to build this machine, and the
biggest drive I had lying around was 4gb.

A few years have passed, and now we're constantly having space problems. I
bought an 80gb WD drive, slaved it in, and used the WD utility that came
with the drive to copy the entire partition to the new drive. Then I pulled
the old 4gb drive out, set the 80gb to be the master (cable select,
actually - and it correctly shows up as the primary master). Wouldn't boot.
Ok, not too surprising, I figured I would have to fixmbr and fixboot. I
stuck the XP Pro CD in, loaded the recovery console, did a fixmbr, and then
fixboot.

Now things started to get hairy. I got an error stating "FIXBOOT cannot
find the system drive, or the drive specified is not valid". Uh oh. Tried
"fixboot c:", and that reported success. However, when I rebooted the
machine, it didn't work. Looks on IDE-0 for boot information and says "not
found."

So, what now? Is there no way to copy everything over to the new drive and
just chuck the old one? I can also leave it in as a slave, if that works.
But I want to get the system running off the new drive, so the system drive
has some free space on it. How do I do this?

Thanks for any help!

Sincerely,
-Josh

 

[Guest]

First off,the WDigital utility wont copy xp 99% of the time,actually its
worth-
less in xp.If the 4gb hd is ok,install as master,install the wd as slave on
the
same ide chain,on start-up,enter the BIOS,install xp cd,boot to xp cd (adjust
in BIOS if needed),then boot to cd,recovery,typeiskPart In DiskPart delete
the partition for the wd drive,create one,then press Esc,then type:FORMAT D:
/FS:ntfs D:being wd,when its thru type:EXIT Let xp start,then go to run,
type:XCOPY C:\*.* D: /c/h/e/k/r In the DOS window agree to all,when its
thru,youre done,shutdown computer,switch the jumpers on hds.D: being wd,
but the letter is substitutable,remember xp doesnt copy very well,if thiers
a
problem,boot to cd,select,repair this copy of xp.

 

[SlowJet]

For hundreds of thousands of people that have used Dataligeguard tools to
set up a new larger hard drive and the thousands that have tried the wrong
way by using XCOPY command I say to you,

BOLONGA.

SJ

 

[CWatters]

...remember xp doesnt copy very well

...well not if you use xcopy.