Make A Bootable Copy Of XP On Another Disk

[Gary Brown]

Hi,

I would like to make a bootable copy of my XP on an old, small disk.
I bought Acronis Home for this then discovered it will clone only the
entire disk not just the OS partition. Is there anything readily available
that will do this? The OS and application partitions will fit on the
maintenance disk but a third, large, partition holds data not needed
there.

I want a copy of XP for maintenance should the primary disk go bad
without having to do yet another install. I can just copy needed
applications.

Thanks,
Gary

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

Hi,

I would like to make a bootable copy of my XP on an old, small disk.
I bought Acronis Home for this then discovered it will clone only the
entire disk not just the OS partition. Is there anything readily available
that will do this? The OS and application partitions will fit on the
maintenance disk but a third, large, partition holds data not needed
there.

I want a copy of XP for maintenance should the primary disk go bad
without having to do yet another install. I can just copy needed
applications.

Thanks,
Gary

Do you have another Win2000/XP PC somewhere?

 

[Dave Cohen]

Hi,

I would like to make a bootable copy of my XP on an old, small disk.
I bought Acronis Home for this then discovered it will clone only the
entire disk not just the OS partition. Is there anything readily available
that will do this? The OS and application partitions will fit on the
maintenance disk but a third, large, partition holds data not needed
there.

I want a copy of XP for maintenance should the primary disk go bad
without having to do yet another install. I can just copy needed
applications.

Thanks,
Gary

It's a bit late since you've already bought Acronis. Another approach
would have been to get something like bootitng and use it to end up with
two partitions, the first with just the os and program files. You can
then create an image from that, hopefully sufficiently small for your
purposes.
To get the very smallest size os partition, you could specify program
files to be on another partition, but I don't see how this can be done
once you've built the system without doing a bunch of remove and
re-install of your apps.
Dave Cohen

 

[Squire]

You can use BootitNG or Partition Magic to create a bootable mirror image of
your Partition with the operating system on it.

The best way is to reduce the size of the partition to its minimum size,
Then you can copy the partition to an Unallocated space on another drive.
I use Partition Magic myself and it is the easiest to use for this.
But costs a bit more than BootitNG.

 

[peter]

If the only thing you want on that old small disk is XP why not do a dual
boot installation of XP onto that disk???
It is fairly easy....
you simply start your system with the XP Cd in place...and when the message
comes up "hit any key to boot from Cd " do so.
Pick new install and be sure to pick that old small disk as the place to
install to.XP will of course change the boot sector of your C(main) hard
drive but it will setup the dual boot.This will come up when you boot your
system and you will have a choice so be sure to name the new installation
different....
the drawback is that boot sector change on the C drive...if you ever format
the C drive you will lose that dual boot
Do a Google for DualBoot XP

peter

 

[Timothy Daniels]

I would like to make a bootable copy of my XP on an old, small disk.
I bought Acronis Home for this then discovered it will clone only the
entire disk not just the OS partition. Is there anything readily available
that will do this?

Yes. Symantec's Ghost can do that. Also Future System Solutions'
Casper XP. You can download a free 30-day trial version of
Casper XP from www.FSSdev.com/products/casperxp/ . It can
clone a single partition from among other partitions on the source
HD, and it can put the clone among other partitions on the
destination HD. The only restriction on the trial version is that the
clone partition will be the same size as the original partition.

*TimDaniels*

 

[Plato]

I would like to make a bootable copy of my XP on an old, small disk.
I bought Acronis Home for this then discovered it will clone only the
entire disk not just the OS partition. Is there anything readily available
that will do this? The OS and application partitions will fit on the
maintenance disk but a third, large, partition holds data not needed
there.

http://www.bootdisk.com/utility.htm
XP Specific
File and Disk Utilities
Free Drive Image/Cloning

 

[Gary Brown]

I would like to make a bootable copy of my XP on an old, small disk.

Thanks for the suggestions. I have a copy of Partition Magic 8.0
somewhere but can't find it.

I've concluded that what I want is more trouble than it is worth.
Installing a minimal XP and applications on the small disk then
disconnecting it will be sufficient.

The system was just recovered from a hard disk and power
supply failure. Having XP working on another disk was essential
to determining the problems and minimizing the loss.

Thanks again,
Gary