-Help needed in cloning a boot drive

[Air Force Jayhawk]

I am attempting to replace my current c:\ drive with a new drive with
three partitions, and make the new drive the boot drive.

I have tried the beta of XXClone but it didn't work right.

Any suggestions on a program that will do the trick? I have no need
for bells and whistles, just a simple tool that will dup my current
boot drive to another.

Thanks in advance!

AFJ

 

[Willit]

The clone is a piece of cake, making the partitions are a
diffrent thing. The demo will make the clone

http://www.fssdev.com/products/

Want to test drive a Demo for 30 days. It has some
features disabled.

http://downloads-zdnet.com.com/3000-2248-10161151.html

 

[Alex Nichol]

I am attempting to replace my current c:\ drive with a new drive with
three partitions, and make the new drive the boot drive.

What I use is BootIT NG, from http://www.BootitNG.com ($35 shareware -
30 day full functional trial)

Download, to its own folder, extract from the zip, run the bootitng to
make a boot floppy.

With the new drive plugged in as slave/secondary, boot the floppy,
Cancel Install, entering maintenance, then click on Partition work.
Highlight your C:,Copy, then on left select the new drive (HD1) and
Paste.

You might then consider a resize up a bit. Then if you already have
other partitions on the original drive, copy them in the same way. For
new ones, I would wait until the system is in action again

Now click on 'View MBR' and in it highlight the entry for this new C
partition and click the 'Set Active' Click 'Write Standard MBR' and
Apply. Also make a check that this partition is in the same place in
the table as it was if you do a View MBR on the old one - if not use the
Up or down to correct it.

Close out, swap the disks to make the new one the one that boots, and
reboot into XP.. You can now make more partitions as desired: Control
Panel - Admin Tools - Computer Management, select Disk Management and
look lower right for the graphic of the drive. R-click in Unallocated
space, take Create Partition.

Note that you can only have a total of four - if you want more than
that, make one an extended partition, in the free space of which you can
r-click and make volumes (which behave in exactly the same way)

 

[Air Force Jayhawk]

The clone is a piece of cake, making the partitions are a
diffrent thing. The demo will make the clone

http://www.fssdev.com/products/

Want to test drive a Demo for 30 days. It has some
features disabled.

http://downloads-zdnet.com.com/3000-2248-10161151.html

Great software but it didn't work.

-----
Don't understand boot disks and boot records and all but think I
discovered a "feature" of XP.

Several months ago I upgraded from 98SE to XP. Should have done a
clean install but chose not to. 98SE used (naturally) FAT 32; I
elected to switch to NTFS per some advice. XP created a new partition
of NTFS, leaving behind a tiny (7mb) fat 32 partition that contained
the system files and perhaps the master boot record.

This weekend I bought a new drive to replace the old one and have
tried several programs to clone the old c:\ drive to the new drive.
Tried the Maxtor disk, XXclone, and Casper XP. None worked. I
discovered only too late that the two original partions were probably
causing the problem.

Reason number 753 to do a clean install vs an upgrade.

AFD

 

[I'm Dan]

...(snipped)...
Several months ago I upgraded from 98SE to XP. Should have
done a clean install but chose not to. 98SE used (naturally)
FAT 32; I elected to switch to NTFS per some advice. XP
created a new partition of NTFS, leaving behind a tiny (7mb)
fat 32 partition that contained the system files and perhaps the
master boot record.

This weekend I bought a new drive to replace the old one
and have tried several programs to clone the old c:\ drive to
the new drive. Tried the Maxtor disk, XXclone, and Casper
XP. None worked. I discovered only too late that the two
original partions were probably causing the problem.

Reason number 753 to do a clean install vs an upgrade.

AFJ, are you still trying to solve that problem, or did you give up and
do a clean install? If you're still working on it, then perhaps you can
provide a better description of the problem. (If you've already
reinstalled, then the issue is moot.)

In particular, what happened when you tried the Maxtor/xxclone/Casper
attempts? Unlike Win9x, XP (and NT/2000) have a few "features" that can
trip you up -- IME, most people who claim any given cloning utility
didn't work are being tripped up by XP, not by the utility. But simply
saying it didn't work doesn't give us any clues on what may have gone
wrong.

Also, are you sure XP left behind a small FAT32 partition? I ask
because it's not unusual for XP to leave behind a small 8MB
*unallocated* space, but that's not a partition. I was ready to believe
you had an actual partition instead of just unallocated space, until you
mentioned your XP upgrade was on C: (if I'm reading correctly). That
sounds to me like XP only saw one partition while it was installing, so
perhaps you mistook unallocated space for a partition. Perhaps you can
clarify -- when you boot XP and use its Disk Management service, does it
show two partitions? Does it identify one as the system partition and
the other as the boot partition? Does the small partition have a drive
letter?