Moving XP Home to new hard drive

[John Hart]

I purchased a new 160GB West. Dig. hard drive to replace
my current primary HD. I disconnected my current slave
drive and made the old HD the slave and the new HD the
master. I restarted and winxp loaded from the old HD. I
ran the WD HD setup program and told it make the new
drive bootable and copy all of the files from the old to
the new drive. It formatted and partitioned the drive
and copied all of the files over and then it said that it
needed to restart to make the new drive the boot drive.
When I did the restart, it got to the winxp loading
screen but bombed back to "Windows quit unexpectedly, do
you want to try Safe Mode" screen. I tried safe mode and
safe mode with command prompt but got the same result. I
turned it off and switched the old drive back to master
and the new drive to slave and then winxp would load fine
and it recognized the new drive as drive D:. Western
Digital says that it is a windows problem and that they
cannot help me. Does xp not run because of the disk
copy? Should I do a full reinstall? My windows disk is
an OEM edition. Can I use that to install xp on the new
drive?

Thanks.

 

[I'm Dan]

I purchased a new 160GB West. Dig. hard drive to replace
my current primary HD. I disconnected my current slave
drive and made the old HD the slave and the new HD the
master. I restarted and winxp loaded from the old HD. I
ran the WD HD setup program and told it make the new
drive bootable and copy all of the files from the old to
the new drive. It formatted and partitioned the drive
and copied all of the files over and then it said that it
needed to restart to make the new drive the boot drive.
When I did the restart, it got to the winxp loading
screen but bombed back to "Windows quit unexpectedly, do
you want to try Safe Mode" screen. I tried safe mode and
safe mode with command prompt but got the same result. I
turned it off and switched the old drive back to master
and the new drive to slave and then winxp would load fine
and it recognized the new drive as drive D:. Western
Digital says that it is a windows problem and that they
cannot help me. Does xp not run because of the disk
copy? Should I do a full reinstall? My windows disk is
an OEM edition. Can I use that to install xp on the new
drive?

You blew it when you "restarted and winxp loaded from the old HD." You were
supposed to put both disks in and use Data Lifeguard immediately to prep and
copy. Win NT/2K/XP have additional "features" that weren't in 95/98/ME, and
they'll screw you up if you let them. The key is to not give XP the chance
to screw up -- do *not* let old-XP see the new disk before you copy
everything to the new disk, and do *not* let new-XP see the old disk the
first time it boots up.

The problem is you let XP see the new drive first, and it assigned that
drive the letter 'D:'. Then when you make the copy, the new XP can't boot
properly because it's supposed to boot up as 'C:' but already "knows" it is
'D:', so you end up with a conflicted OS. If you hadn't let old-XP see the
new disk first, the new copy wouldn't know anything about being 'D:'.

At this point, you have to make XP forget anything about being 'D:'.
Sometimes you can make it work by using the "Kawecki trick". Get a Win98
boot floppy (download from www.bootdisk.com, if necessary). Put the new
disk in as master, leave the old disk out (or disconnected). Boot from the
boot floppy. At the command prompt, enter "fdisk /mbr" (without quotes).
Remove floppy and reboot from the new disk. See if it now comes up properly
as 'C:'. If it works, you can put the old disk back in as slave if you
want, but not until the new disk is up and running as a one-disk system
first. If it doesn't work, you may need to use a more intelligent ($$) OS
cloner/copier.