Copy and swap hard drive

[Greg Maxey]

Anna,

No joy on the Ghost 2003 method. Again I could not get passed the flashing
cursor in Starting PC DOS.

For awhile there I thougth I had hit pay dirt using Ghost 9.0. I did manage
to get all four drives copied to unlettered partitions on the 250G drive. I
then booted the machine with that drive only in the Drive 0 slot. Windows
loaded after doing a assigning drive C:\ to the first partition and doing a
Windows CHKDSK. When Windows loaded the first time I noticed that a few of
my startup programs didn't start. I looked in My Computer and the drives D,
E, and F were not displayed. I uese Control Panel>Computer Management>Disk
Management then name them as D:, E:, and F. I shut down and started Windows
again and Windoes perfromed CHKDSK on D: and E: then booted and everything
appeared to run perfectly.

Elation was soon dashed as I noticed that Windows runs CHKDSK on D: and E:
everytime the computer is restarted. I am back to squared 1.

 

[Ghostrider]

GHalleck,

No the disck imaging files do not exist. I used Ghost 9.0 to "copy" the
four partitions from the smaller disk to the larger disk. When I did the
copy, I didn't have the option to copy C: on one drive to C: on the other.
That, I think would have been ideal. After copying the disk, I fully
expected that I could simply move it to where the old source drive was and
be done. But no, windows was looking for installations files with pointer to
old drive letters.

Thanks for you attempt to help.

Might want to consider for future reference: Ghost has always
been complicated, in one way or the other. When Symantec bought
out DiskImage, one might have thought that it combined the best
of both applications. Might not have happened just so ideally.
Acronis TrueImage is far easier and intuitive to use.

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

Pegasus.
0 Word hangs on startup.

That was a typo. I meant WindowsXP hangs on startup at the welcome
screen.

No problem.

I have had a face to face conversation with a person at work that has
confirmed Anna's caution and predicted that booting the PC with both
disks installed immediately after the copy was exactly what caused most
of my problems.

This is quite likely.

He also advised that I recopy all of the partitions to
the new 250G drive without assigning drive letters. He said that when
I boot the machine with just the new drive installed that BIOS will
assign the appropriate drive letters.

This is incorrect. The BIOS does NOT assign any drive letters -
it does not even know about drive letters. Windows will do this
when you first boot on your new disk.

Here is my plan of attack:
1. Disk 0 with 160G Drive installed.
2. Disk 1 with 250G Drive installed (formatted with 250G unallocated
space)
3. Use Disk Management to create 4 unlettered partitions on Drive 1.
4. Use GHOST Drive Copy utility to copy the C:, D:, E: and F:
partitions from the source to the new drive. The copy of C: will
include the MBR.
5. Shut down the machine.
6. Remove the source Drive and move the cabling of the 250G drive to
the Disk 0 position.
7. Take a deep breathe.
8. Reboot the machine.
9. Do one of the following:
a. Sign in relief and do a backflip as WindowsXP loads normally.
b. Scream bloody murder.
10. If a., then shut down the maching. Put the old drive back in the
Disk 1 position, reboot and hope that BIOS doesn't go nuts with have
two drives with the same drive letters.

As I said, the BIOS does not know about drive letters.

Hopefully someone can confirm or advise differently.

Thanks

If this does not work then you should do one of the following:
- Forget the old installation and reload WinXP on the new disk.
- Use a product other than Ghost to image your disk. There are
several around which I have used successfully, e.g. Acronis,
or Bart PE + xcopy.exe (costs nothing!).