Cloning Hard disk

[bole2cant]

I just cloned my Disk 0 (C:, D:, E:, and F onto Disk 1, using Western
Digitals Disk to Disk copy program. Everything went just fine, except when I
try to use it (replace Disk 0 with Disk 1) it is seen as Drive G:, not C: and
hangs just before the desktop shows up.

How do I change the drive letters from G:, H:, I:, and J: to C:, D:, E:, and
F:?

Or is my assumption that this will correct the problem wrong?

 

[R. McCarty]

Using both disks at the same time causes the lettering scheme.
Your original drive lettering stops at F:, so the second drive will
take the next letters (G +++). For this to work, you would have
to remove the original drive. Boot to the newly cloned drive,
which should use drive letters C-E. Then shutdown re-install the
old drive as a secondary. On re-boot Windows will see the drive
and you can use Disk Manager from the Management console to
assign the letters you want.

 

[Guest]

Did you clone whilst running Windows XP

If it is possible, you should clone in DOS mode, before the drive is accessed by XP. XP will assign drive letters which 'remain' on the drive after the clone process and thus if you attempt to run the system, all path associations are incorrect. That is to say, what registry or file associations are supposed to read as C:\folder\file.xxx will not work as that file is now on yuor 'G' disk

By cloning in DOS mode, the Drive Letter is not written to the disk as in XP

A more reliable solution is to use Norton Ghost 2003 or later [for NTFS support] and create [Backup] an 'Image' of your C Drive into another partition or disk drive and then use Ghost to restore that image to a new partition on the new drive. This is performed in DOS mode. Unplug the old C Drive and now the newly imaged drive is C Drive. You have to ensure the new disk is made a Master and plugged into the original IDE interface where the old drive was

I use this process to make reliable backups of stand alone systems to ensure that full operating status can be achieved in case of failure, within 30 minutes. You may want to consider the benefits of this now that you have two hard drives

To change drive letters, you can use disk management for anyhting BUT a system Disk [C Drive]
START>CONTROL PANEL>ADMINISTRATIVE TOOLS>COMPUTER MANAGEMEN
select DISK MANAGEMENT from the list in the windo
right click on the G Driv
select CHANGE DRIVE LETTER AND PATH

good luck

 

[bole2cant]

For this to work, you would have
to remove the original drive. Boot to the newly cloned drive,
which should use drive letters C-E.

=========

That is the problem. I removed the old drive and the new drive does NOT use the
drive letters C-E. It sees the first drive as G:, not C: The only way I know
this is because when I booted the new cloned drive, chkdsk ran on Drive G:

Thanks for the reply.

 

[Menno Hershberger]

I just cloned my Disk 0 (C:, D:, E:, and F onto Disk 1, using
Western Digitals Disk to Disk copy program. Everything went just fine,
except when I try to use it (replace Disk 0 with Disk 1) it is seen as
Drive G:, not C: and hangs just before the desktop shows up.

How do I change the drive letters from G:, H:, I:, and J: to C:, D:,
E:, and F:?

Did you take the old drive clear out and make the new one master? If
it's a mirror of the old drive, the drive letters should be right. However
if you leave the old drive in as slave (or secondary master), it will shift
your drive letters around. C would be the new drive's C, and D would be the
old drive's C - then E, F, and G would be the new drive's 2nd, 3rd, and 4th
partitions. H, I, and J, would be the old drive's last three partitons. It
could get messy. You'd need to reformat the old drive as all extended
partitions in order to keep your new drive's drive letters in order.
I think...

 

[I'm Dan]

I just cloned my Disk 0 (C:, D:, E:, and F onto Disk 1, using Western
Digitals Disk to Disk copy program. Everything went just fine, except when I
try to use it (replace Disk 0 with Disk 1) it is seen as Drive G:, not C: and
hangs just before the desktop shows up.

How do I change the drive letters from G:, H:, I:, and J: to C:, D:, E:, and
F:?

This is a fairly common problem. You're not supposed to let old-XP see the
new disk before doing the cloning, and you're not supposed to let new-XP see
the old disk before it's booted up at least once and rebuilt its drive
letter table.

You didn't say which partition XP is supposed to be on, but if it's supposed
to be "C", then there's a neat little trick described here by Michal Kawecki
a little over a year ago. Remove the old HDD, make sure the XP partition on
the new HDD is the active partition, boot from a *Win98* boot floppy
(download one from www.bootdisk.com, if necessary), at the DOS prompt run
the command
"fdisk /mbr", remove the floppy, reboot from HDD, and see if XP now boots up
as "C".

The other drive letters can always be adjusted in Disk Mgmt, if necessary,
but it's the system/boot partition people have trouble with.