Installing a new hard drive

[K Cox]

I have a 20 gig hard drive on my Gateway Performance PC.
I have the drive partitioned into two 9+ gig partitions.
The drive with the OS on it is getting pretty full. So I
purchased an 80 gig Western Digital, threw it in,
formatted and partitioned it. XP has no problem
recognizing the new hard drive and partitions. Now I'd
like to copy my old OS drive to one of the partitions on
the new hard drive. How do I accomplish this task?

 

[JT Neville]

Ghost might work, but I don't use it personally.

Ok this isn't for the inexperienced and does not include
every step. It's jsut a rough outline to follow if you
are comfortable at working low level.

If I had to do this I would use Disk Manager to set the
new disc as active, then I would install both drives in a
2nd PC. Next I would enable all files and do a complete
copy of the OS partition from the old hard drive to the
primary partion on the new hard drive.

I'd then reinstall just the new hard drive into the
orignal PC and boot.

In the old days I would use a DOS disc to /mbr the disk
and then run just the start of the NT installer to reset
the boot partition info (which you can't copy via any
version of Windows), but I haven't found that necessary
with XP, just NT and NT2K.

+++

Might be easier to use the user migration tool, do a clean
install then import your user settings. But I haven't
played with that tool yet. Any way you look at it, it's
no walk in the park.

 

[K Cox]

Dude,
It ain't that serious. Don't know if you're trying to
make me feel bad because I'm no computer geek, but I'm
sure there's ways to do what I'm attempting without
screwing with my registry. Maybe you should get out more
and learn how to interact with people. You can keep your
advice.

Thanks, but no thanks!

-----Original Message-----

I have a 20 gig hard drive on my Gateway Performance
PC. I have the drive partitioned into two 9+ gig partitions.
The drive with the OS on it is getting pretty full. So I
purchased an 80 gig Western Digital, threw it in,
formatted and partitioned it. XP has no problem
recognizing the new hard drive and partitions. Now I'd
like to copy my old OS drive to one of the partitions on
the new hard drive. How do I accomplish this task?

You've already created problems for yourself. You should not have let XP
see the new drive. The way you should have done it was to use a simple disk
copy utility from the drive manufacturer. Western Digital provides free
software specifically for that purpose. If you didn't get a floppy disk
with your new HD, visit www.wdc.com and download it (Data Lifeguard) to a
floppy. To use, it's as simple as plugging in both HD's, boot from the
floppy, copy one HD to the other, remove old HD, put new HD in its place,
and reboot. You're not supposed to install the new HD first and try to
format it with XP; just put it in bare and boot the utility floppy. Many
people make this mistake, as you did, which gives XP a chance to give the
new HD a different drive letter, which can screw things up when you
subsequently try to copy the OS.

Now that you've messed up, you'll need to do some surgery with regedit.
Assuming your OS drive letter is C:, start regedit and navigate to the
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\MountedDevices] registry key. You'll find a
bunch of entries like "\??\Volume{...}"

and "\DosDevices\...". Delete them