Change default boot drive

[Guest]

I have a long request.

I have a hard drive with 2 partition C and D. Recently I bought a hard
drive. Now I want to move entire things/everything from C to the new hard
drive and boot from the new hard drive. After that, I want to erase
everything in C and kill the partition C so that I only have the D and the
new hard drive. How?

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

I have a long request.

I have a hard drive with 2 partition C and D. Recently I bought a hard
drive. Now I want to move entire things/everything from C to the new hard
drive and boot from the new hard drive. After that, I want to erase
everything in C and kill the partition C so that I only have the D and the
new hard drive. How?

You need a partition manager or an imaging product like the
ones made by Acronis to copy your existing partitions to a
new disk.

After you've copied your partitions, make sure to disconnect
the old disk for the first boot. If you have both connected then
you might get some nasty surprises.

 

[Michael C]

I have a long request.

I have a hard drive with 2 partition C and D. Recently I bought a hard
drive. Now I want to move entire things/everything from C to the new hard
drive and boot from the new hard drive. After that, I want to erase
everything in C and kill the partition C so that I only have the D and the
new hard drive. How?

Use a program called ghost, it can copy 1 partition to another quite
quickly. I believe you can get it for $40. The other option is of course
partition magic which might even be better suited to your task. Make sure
with either you get a version new enough to support your OS.

Michael

 

[Guest]

make the current drive a slave (ie change the jumper) then install the new
drive as master, boot with the xp cd and format and install XP, then copy all
your data from the old drive to the new drive, if You want to only have one
partition, use Partition magic to merge the partitions on the old drive, you
will still have your data, then it's
easy to copy the data to either an exterior drive or CD if you have a burner.

of course this is not a step by step instructional, but a general overview.
to copy a partition from the old drive to a new (larger?) drive is not
recommended, as you would not get full use of the new partition, I suggest a
new install with a larger (20-30 gig for XP) and then copy your data over.

There are many ways to do this, my suggestion is just one way.

 

[Ken Blake]

I have a long request.

I have a hard drive with 2 partition C and D. Recently I bought a hard
drive. Now I want to move entire things/everything from C to the new
hard drive

There are several third-pary programs that can do this easily. My favorite
is Acronis True Image.

and boot from the new hard drive. After that, I want to
erase everything in C and kill the partition C so that I only have
the D and the new hard drive. How?

Presumably you don't want to just kill the C: partition, you want to expand
the D: partition to take up the full size of the drive. And presumably there
is data on D: you want to keep.
Windows XP provides no way of changing the partition structure of the drive
nondestructively. The only way to do what you want is with third-party
software. Partition Magic is the best-known such program, but there are
freeware/shareware alternatives. One such program is BootIt Next Generation.
It's shareware, but comes with a free 30-day trial, so you should be able to
do what you want within that 30 days. I haven't used it myself, but it comes
highly recommended by several other MVPs here.



There are no guarantees that any of this always works perfectly. However
unlikely, it's always possible that something might go wrong. For that
reason it's prudent to be sure you have a backup of anything you can't
afford to lose before beginning.