Swap sys HD

[Bill]

Hello all,
I have run into a problem and I cant find the answer - I
hope you can help me.

When I built this machine (Athlon 900/XP pro), I had to
make a decision. Because of a lot of factors that I wont
bore you with, I ended up using a 6 Gig HD as my system
drive (C. I thought this would be adequate since I
planned to install all programs and data, etc, on a
larger D drive.

Well... that turned out not to be true. My C: drive has
only 200 megs left. I have moved the pagefile.sys file
and everything else I could find (the 'My Documents
folder, for example), but I am still running out of
space. I have cleaned out everything I could too.

I would like to swap this C drive out for a new, bigger
one without having to start from scratch reinstalling all
the applications on other drives (since the registry,
Application Data folders and others would be gone). I am
a devloper with all kinds of tools and databases that
would be a real pain to reconfigure.

I tried Norton Ghost to make an image that can be
restored on a non-matching size drive, but got an error.
I asked MS about this and they told me that they only
recommend starting from scratch.

Does anyone know a way I could tackle this?
Thanks!
Bill

 

[Woody]

Most hard drive manufactures have a program that lets you image one drive to
another. Check your HD manufacturers web site for the program or check the
CD that came with the drive......

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

Hello all,
I have run into a problem and I cant find the answer - I
hope you can help me.

When I built this machine (Athlon 900/XP pro), I had to
make a decision. Because of a lot of factors that I wont
bore you with, I ended up using a 6 Gig HD as my system
drive (C. I thought this would be adequate since I
planned to install all programs and data, etc, on a
larger D drive.

Well... that turned out not to be true. My C: drive has
only 200 megs left. I have moved the pagefile.sys file
and everything else I could find (the 'My Documents
folder, for example), but I am still running out of
space. I have cleaned out everything I could too.

I would like to swap this C drive out for a new, bigger
one without having to start from scratch reinstalling all
the applications on other drives (since the registry,
Application Data folders and others would be gone). I am
a devloper with all kinds of tools and databases that
would be a real pain to reconfigure.

I tried Norton Ghost to make an image that can be
restored on a non-matching size drive, but got an error.
I asked MS about this and they told me that they only
recommend starting from scratch.

Does anyone know a way I could tackle this?
Thanks!
Bill

I do this sort of thing routinely, without any problem.
Can you provide more details?
- What exactly was the error you got?
- Do you have another WinXP/2000 PC available?
- Why did your drive C: fill up? Are you keeping
your data files there? Not a good idea . . .

 

[Guest]

Hi,

You need to use Norton Ghost 2003 or newer (can support NTFS file system).
If you have cloned the old C drive to the new Hdd. You need to install the
new Hdd as master drive then boot from XP CD to perform a repair installation
of XP. You also need to update all the patches including SP1 or SP2. Your
previous configuration should be retained in this way but there is no 100%
guaranty as things may go wrong during the repair installation, for example,
a sudden power failure.
BTW, have you tried to clean up the C drive by running disk cleanup on a
regular basis to clear the internet cache, cookies and temp files? Also, you
can change the restore files to about 200MB or even shut it down to gain more
free space. I done these for my friend's PC and gain back more than 1G free
space.

Care: backup all data files before doing anything.

Peter