Imaging an NTFS Drive

K

Klaatu

I've used DriveImage many times to clone my entire system from a
smaller to larger hard drive, but it's always been FAT32 to FAT32.

Now I want to replace the HD in my new WinXP Home PC with a larger one
and image the original drive onto it. My PC only has space for one HD,
so I can't just add the second HD as a secondary.

With FAT32, I'd install the new drive, fdisk and format it using a
Win98 boot disk, and then use DI to clone the original to the new.
What is the equivalent process with NTFS? I've never heard of an NTFS
boot disk or a way to fdisk and format a drive with NTFS from "DOS".

What are the steps to do this correctly?

Thanks.
 
M

MooGooGaiPan

Just shoot the image to the new drive as FAT32 and then
convert to NTFS after Windows comes up . . . Good Luck !
 
M

Microsoft Preferred Customer

When you are cloning the hard drive, you are effectively
duplicating/replicatig the data of one hard drive onto another. This
being so, you will only get Fat32 on the new drive and then you will need
to convert it into NTFS using system tools.

Why do you want to clone it? Why not just copy your own data (from MyDocuments) onto CDs and
then reformat and reinstall the OS on new hard drive from scratch.
This way you will make sure your data on new drive is clean.

hth
 
B

Brian

is your original drive ntfs? you do not need to format the new drive when
you use pqdi it will duplicate it over with what ever format is on the
source cd.
 
N

Norm

For starters there is no need to fdisk and format a replacement hard disk
when you are using DI to restore an image. It restores all the data along
with the file system so the partition and format get effectively replaced.
It's no different if you are using NTFS with XP. I regularly image my NTFS
C drive running XP to my FAT32 slave disk and yes I have restored the image
many times. I am using Drive Image 2002, booting from the 2 floppies.
 
A

Alex Nichol

Klaatu said:
I've used DriveImage many times to clone my entire system from a
smaller to larger hard drive, but it's always been FAT32 to FAT32.

Now I want to replace the HD in my new WinXP Home PC with a larger one
and image the original drive onto it. My PC only has space for one HD,
so I can't just add the second HD as a secondary.

With FAT32, I'd install the new drive, fdisk and format it using a
Win98 boot disk, and then use DI to clone the original to the new.
What is the equivalent process with NTFS? I've never heard of an NTFS
boot disk or a way to fdisk and format a drive with NTFS from "DOS".
Click to expand...

What I use is BootIT NG, from http://www.BootitNG.com ($35 shareware -
30 day full functional trial). That will happily clone any type of
drive, and needs no formatting in advance

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),
highlight the Free Space in it, and Paste.

You might then consider a resize up a bit. Or leave some free space so
as later to make a new separate partition it

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.

Close out, swap the disks to make the new one the one that boots, and
reboot into XP.
 

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