Moving info. from old hard drive to new hard drive

[Rob]

I have purchased a new hard drive that I intend to use as my C:\ drive.
Could someone please advise me the best method to transfer my current C:
drive's info., to include the OS to the new drive? I'm open for any advice
or documentation that I may follow. My OS is XP Pro.

I've reviewed the XP file and settings transfer wizard, but I don't know if
that's the route I want to go.

 

[John McGaw]

I have purchased a new hard drive that I intend to use as my C:\ drive.
Could someone please advise me the best method to transfer my current C:
drive's info., to include the OS to the new drive? I'm open for any advice
or documentation that I may follow. My OS is XP Pro.

I've reviewed the XP file and settings transfer wizard, but I don't know if
that's the route I want to go.

The XP wizard will do nothing to move your disk contents from one drive to
another and will certainly not move the OS. You need a cloning tool to do
what you want. There are several free ones out there such as
http://www.snapfiles.com/download/dlpciclone.html . I've never used that one
but have had good success with EZ Gig II from Apricorn which came along with
a bit of hardware for cloning one notebook drive to another. Just doing a
Google search should turn up some ideas. Start searching for "freeware
transfer drive contents" and refine from there.

 

[Chris]

I have purchased a new hard drive that I intend to use as my C:\ drive.
Could someone please advise me the best method to transfer my current C:
drive's info., to include the OS to the new drive? I'm open for any advice
or documentation that I may follow. My OS is XP Pro.

I've reviewed the XP file and settings transfer wizard, but I don't know if
that's the route I want to go.

Depending on the hard drive you purchased, you may have a utility that
allows you to copy your old hard drive right on over to the new hard
drive, thus allowing you to use the new hard drive as your main system
drive.

The steps are usually fairly easy to follow (disclaimer, I may have
omitted some fairly important steps):

1. Install new hard drive in your system with the jumper setting of
cable select or slave

2. Boot from the hard drive utility diskette, following instructions
on how to set up your new drive (format, copy information from old,
etc.).

3. After copy process, power down the machine, swap jumper
settings/change positions on the cable, (remove old hard drive, etc.)

4. Your new hard drive should be ready for use, and hopefully Windows
XP didn't wig out on you causing you to reactivate, or do some other
strange thing.

Now, if you didn't get a hard drive utility diskette/CD ROM that
allows you to perform the above, you either need to use Drive Image,
Ghost, True Image, or some other program to copy the old hard drive
contents over to the new, following essentially the same steps noted
above.

Lastly, if you are using Serial ATA hard drives, life can be a tad bit
more tricky as the only program I know that works fairly well with the
SATA interface is Drive Image 2002, and that version is a tad bit rare
since Symantec purchased the product from Powerquest.

Hope that helped,
Chris

 

[GTS]

Check any CD's that came with motherboards you might have, as they often
include Symantec Ghost.
I have ghosted dozens of drives, never had a problem. It runs in DOS so you
will need a boot disk of some kind, floppy or Win98 CD etc
P.S. if you are using NTFS you need ghost => 2003.

 

[J. S. Pack]

I have purchased a new hard drive that I intend to use as my C:\ drive.
Could someone please advise me the best method to transfer my current C:
drive's info., to include the OS to the new drive? I'm open for any advice
or documentation that I may follow. My OS is XP Pro.

I've reviewed the XP file and settings transfer wizard, but I don't know if
that's the route I want to go.

As for the cloning, get a free trial of BootitNG. With new drive as slave,
boot the BootitNG floppy, cancel install, go into maintenance/partition
work, and there's a cloning/drive copy option. Then swap the disks,
disconnect the old one so that you boot up w/ only the new disk and you
should be fine, avoiding having the wrong drive letter (PITA).

Afterwards you can also use BootitNG to resize the clusters before
converting to NTFS if you want to.

W/ Ghost, use the option flags -FDSP.

 

[terry_b17]

Rob,
seagate , maxtor and western digital all offer tools to
partition,format and copy the contents of your old drive to the new .
i used maxtors maxblast for windows to copy my 6 gb bigfoot to my new
120 gb western digital . i have used wd lifeguard in the past and it
works about the same . copied everything including my windows 98 .
hope this helps,
terry

==============
Posted through www.HowToFixComputers.com/bb - free access to hardware troubleshooting newsgroups.

 

[Same Guy]

I have purchased a new hard drive that I intend to use as my C:\ drive.
Could someone please advise me the best method to transfer my current C:
drive's info., to include the OS to the new drive? I'm open for any advice
or documentation that I may follow. My OS is XP Pro.

I've reviewed the XP file and settings transfer wizard, but I don't know if
that's the route I want to go.

This was posted April 15, 2004 in alt.comp.hardware.homebuilt by Jim. I
tried it and it works great.

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Here's one way, and it's FREE:

1) Download BootIt NG ( http://www.bootitng.com ). Unzip, execute
bootitng.exe, and create the floppy disk (or ISO and burn it, your
choice).
Set aside for now.

2) Shutdown PC and move old HD to either slave on primary IDE channel,
or
primary on secondary IDE channel. Just so long as it becomes the
subordinate HD (to the new HD).

3) Boot the BootIt NG floppy (or CD). When the Welcome screen appears,
hit
Cancel (to abort the install). Follow the prompts to the desktop, then
select Partition Work.

4) Your new HD should be listed as HD0 (and verifiable as such since it
has
no partitions). The old HD should be HD1, and all partitions listed
when
selected. Simply Copy and Paste your existing partition(s), one by one,
from HD1 (the old HD) to HD0 (the new HD). Following the Copy of each
partition, feel free to Resize it (most people are moving to larger HDs,
so
this is to be expected).

5) Once all partitions are copied, make sure HD0 (the new HD) is
selected
and hit View MBR. Make sure the bootable partition is listed first
*and*
marked active (it normally is, but if not, do so now, manually). Hit
Std
MBR, hit Apply, then Close to exit Partition Work. Remove the floppy/CD
and
shutdown.

6) Remove the *old* HD, reboot, and you'll be running off the new HD!

When XP reloads, it will probably want to reboot (the new HD will be
seen as
a new device). Rebooting is not really necessary, but do so if you
wish. I
recommend keeping the old HD off the system and untouched for a while
until
you feel comfortable that all is well with the new drive. Consider it
your
backup! If anything goes wrong, you can always start the whole process
over
and try again. The procedures I've outlined are NON-DESTRUCTIVE to your
original HD and data! Once you feel confident all is OK, you can add
the
old HD back, clean it up (use BootIt NG again, if you like), and use it
for
data storage, perhaps.

HTH

Jim

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