Help!How to copy an active partion to a new drive???

  • Thread starter Thread starter Tony
  • Start date Start date
T

Tony

Hi,
I currently have XP installed on a 30 Gig hard drive
(C-Which is Active Partition). I have installed another
new hard drive which has two partitions (D & E). I'm
planning to install another OS on C (Because the OS I'm
trying to install does not support the new drive (D &
E). Is there a way that I could move all the contents of
C (including the XP boot) to D and make D Active , so
that I can re-format the current C to install my new OS?
This way I don't have to re-install XP. Because this
new OS installation is only temporary for a month and I
will have to go back to what it was before.

Thanks
 
Tony said:
I currently have XP installed on a 30 Gig hard drive
(C-Which is Active Partition). I have installed another
new hard drive which has two partitions (D & E). I'm
planning to install another OS on C (Because the OS I'm
trying to install does not support the new drive (D &
E). Is there a way that I could move all the contents of
C (including the XP boot) to D and make D Active , so
that I can re-format the current C to install my new OS?
This way I don't have to re-install XP. Because this
new OS installation is only temporary for a month and I
will have to go back to what it was before.
Click to expand...

Tony,

Windows XP doesn't like changing the drive letter at all. It is
possible, but it is very difficult and awkward. I cannot
recommend it.

You can copy the partition, but you should then make sure it
still has the same drive letter, which is possible.

Also, the primary active partition on the first drive is used
for booting, so it needs to have or to keep the boot files
NTDETECT.COM, NTLDR, BOOT.INI, possibly a few others, and proper
boot records.

Hans-Georg
 
Tony said:
Hi,
I currently have XP installed on a 30 Gig hard drive
(C-Which is Active Partition). I have installed another
new hard drive which has two partitions (D & E). I'm
planning to install another OS on C (Because the OS I'm
trying to install does not support the new drive (D &
E). Is there a way that I could move all the contents of
C (including the XP boot) to D and make D Active , so
that I can re-format the current C to install my new OS?
This way I don't have to re-install XP. Because this
new OS installation is only temporary for a month and I
will have to go back to what it was before.

Thanks
Click to expand...

Without more information on your actual configuration and what OS you are
planning to install I can only offer the suggestion below.
You will either need third party boot manager software to accomplish this,
or hard drive pullouts and another hard drive to swap out the C drive.

--

Michael Stevens MS-MVP XP
(e-mail address removed)
http://michaelstevenstech.com
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