Moving an XP installation onto a different hard drive?

[Victor Bazarov]

My main hard drive has begun to lose its mind. Every so often I get
a booting problem or some application won't work or other issue. It
has worked for me for more than two years, and while it man not be
as reliable as the best out there, at least I got a couple of years
of my system drive. But now it's time to change it.

I've heard/read about the XP's capability to "migrate files and
settings" from another machine, from another network drive, et cetera.
Could that in any way help relocating the contents of the system
partition onto another, larger, hard drive? I would like to avoid to
have to reinstall all the crap I've accumulated over the years.

It seems rather simple: format the other drive, define a partition
of a suitable size, move the boot sector, move the loader, then
create all the directory structure on it and copy all the files.
Sounds like a job for a utility rather than part of the OS, but who
knows, maybe there is a part of the OS that does that? If not, I'd
settle for a utility.

Has anyone heard of something like that?

Thanks!

Victor

 

[Michael Stevens]

My main hard drive has begun to lose its mind. Every so often I get
a booting problem or some application won't work or other issue. It
has worked for me for more than two years, and while it man not be
as reliable as the best out there, at least I got a couple of years
of my system drive. But now it's time to change it.

I've heard/read about the XP's capability to "migrate files and
settings" from another machine, from another network drive, et cetera.
Could that in any way help relocating the contents of the system
partition onto another, larger, hard drive? I would like to avoid to
have to reinstall all the crap I've accumulated over the years.

It seems rather simple: format the other drive, define a partition
of a suitable size, move the boot sector, move the loader, then
create all the directory structure on it and copy all the files.
Sounds like a job for a utility rather than part of the OS, but who
knows, maybe there is a part of the OS that does that? If not, I'd
settle for a utility.

Has anyone heard of something like that?

Thanks!

Victor

You will need to use imaging software to "clone" the current hard drive to
the new one.
Check the links below and the tutorials for information on imaging.

Click on or copy and paste the link below into your web browser address bar.
BootIT NG from Terabyte
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/
Image for Windows and DOS
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/imagew.html
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/downloads/image.zip
Drive Image from Power Quest
http://www.powerquest.com/
Symantec Ghost.
http://www.symantec.com/servsupp.html
Maxblast II Plus
http://tinyurl.com/275m
Western Digital
http://support.wdc.com/download/#dlgtools
Casper XP
http://www.fssdev.com/