New boot HD

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I need to swap out my boot drive for a larger one.

What should I do to make this as painless as possible, i.e. not having to
reinstall all the programs in C:\Program Files?

Thanks in advance,
 
John said:
I need to swap out my boot drive for a larger one.

What should I do to make this as painless as possible, i.e. not having to
reinstall all the programs in C:\Program Files?

Thanks in advance,
Click to expand...

Most disk manufacturers have a free disk cloning
tool on their web site.
 
Thank you.

I have enough free space on another drive to clone it there, without having
to resort to CDs or DVDs. Is that possible.
 
Many people have reported in the newsgroups that they
ran into problems with manufacturer's cloning software,
including myself. Why not go with a commercial-grade
utility that is for one thing only - to make clones of WinXP?
You can download such a utility for a 30-day free trial from
Future Systems Solutions at:
www.FSSdev.com/products/casperxp/

As with all clones of WinNT/2K/XP, start up the clone for
the 1st time with the HD containing its "parent" (i.e. its source
OS) not connected. Then, after the clone's 1st startup, either
the "parent" or its clone can be booted with the other OS
visible, and the partition containing the other OS will appear
as just another "Local Disk" having a file structure that you can
drag 'n drop to/from. You can make either one boot by
adding an entry to the boot.ini file to implement a multi-boot
situation, or you can control which HD boots by changing
which HD is at the head of the BIOS's HD boot order. That
is done by entering the BIOS at startup time and changing
the HD boot order via keyboard input. That order will persist
until the BIOS's ROM battery runs down. Directions on how
to command the BIOS should be in the PC's User's Manual.

*TimDaniels*
 
Yes, it's possible. Here are a couple of methods:

a) Temporarily install the disk as a slave disk in some other
Win2000/XP PC, then use xcopy.exe with the appropriate
switches to copy the system partition to a spare drive.
b) Boot the machine with a Bart PE boot CD, then do the same
as under a) above. A Bart PE boot CD is a terrific tool for
the professional but it requires some three hours to manufacture.

Both method require some knowledge about the WinXP boot
process in order to restore the boot environment after cloning.
Using a commercial imaging product is faster, easier and avoids
the boot problem (but is less fun!).
 
I have Partition Magic 8 but I've only used it to realign some slave drive
partitions on a blank drive.

It says I can make a clone of a drive. But all I've read is that statement.
Is this better than using something such as Ghost? I'd rather not have to buy
any new sw.

Thanks,
 
John said:
I have Partition Magic 8 but I've only used it to realign
some slave drive partitions on a blank drive.

It says I can make a clone of a drive. But all I've read
is that statement. Is this better than using something
such as Ghost? I'd rather not have to buy any new sw.
Click to expand...


Download a free 30-day trial copy of Casper XP from
the website of Future Systems Solution:
www.FSSdev.com/products/casperxp/ . You'll like it
so much that you'll probably buy it like I did.

*TimDaniels*
 
Acronis's True Image is a good product and a step up
from Symantec's Ghost. The only major drawback is
that it will only clone an entire HD, not just one partition.
If you only have one partition on your system drive, it
doesn't hamper you. But if you have more than one
partition, you have to copy all of them to the destination
drive. Furthermore, if you have several partitions on the
destination drive, True Image can't just replace one of them.
It will replace all of them. You can get around this by
copying an "image file" to CDs or DVDs, and then
"restoring" that image to the destination HD, but that is
a hassle, and it takes time.

Casper XP, on the other hand, can copy just one partition
from the source HD directly into either unallocated space
on the destiantion HD or into an existing partition. Even if
the existing partition is smaller than the source partition, if
the source partition's data will fit into the destination partition,
Casper XP has enough sense to do the copy.

I use Casper XP to periodically back up my entire system
to a large capacity HD which is mounted in a removable
tray. On it, I keep 4 to 6 clones from previous backups,
and each of them can be immediately booted in case I have
a failure of my system HD. This backup method would be
impractical using Acronis's True Image.

*TimDaniels*
 
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