Move XP boot to other drive

J

Jan Plett

My computer came with XP home installed on its 60GB
drive. For reasons I won't go into here, I created a new
logical partition containing NTFS and FAT32 partitions,
and a friend managed to successfully move the XP boot up
to the NTFS partition, so that I could install an
alternative boot to Win98SE in a 2GB FAT16 primary
partition. A boot manager allows me to choose the boot
partition.

However, my friend is abroad, and I now want to install an
8GB drive as IDE 0, and move my XP boot partition (and
possibly the Win98 boot) to the new drive so I can use the
whole of the 60GB disk for data storage on IDE 1.

I put the necessary boot files on the new 8GB drive which
I installed as drive 0 and wrote a boot.ini so that I
could still boot to the existing partition on what is now
drive 1. Then I backed up the entire boot partition to a
file and restored it to drive 0, and added to the boot.ini
so that I could choose to boot to XP on drive 0. However,
if I try to boot to this drive, XP immediately complains
that it can't find WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM, even
though there is no such folder on the original system.

I realise that even if I could fix this problem there
would be a zillion registry entries pointing the wrong
way, but I'd hoped I could use Funduc registry
search/replace to fix them.

I'd really prefer not to start a new installation from
scratch using the i386 folder that came on my original
hard disk, because it would take so long to get it like my
current installation which works very well and is stuffed
with updates and service packs, but as you will have
gathered, I don't really know what I'm doing and would
welcome some advice...
 
H

Hans-Georg Michna

Jan Plett said:
I realise that even if I could fix this problem there
would be a zillion registry entries pointing the wrong
way, but I'd hoped I could use Funduc registry
search/replace to fix them.

I'd really prefer not to start a new installation from
scratch using the i386 folder that came on my original
hard disk, because it would take so long to get it like my
current installation which works very well and is stuffed
with updates and service packs, but as you will have
gathered, I don't really know what I'm doing and would
welcome some advice...

Jan,

please have a look at http://www.michna.com/kb/WxMove.htm for
some additional information.

One useful method to fix problems after moving an installation
is the repair (upgrade) installation.

Hans-Georg
 

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