Transferring existing disk to new disk

[Bill]

I'm trying to replace my old 20GB drive with a 120GB
drive and I want to avoid a clean reinstall of XP and all
of my apps, etc. I've tried using Data Lifegard Disk-to-
Disk Copy which came with my new WD drive and it seems to
work OK. However, I have not been able to figure out how
to get the new drive to assume the drive letter "C". The
Disk Management util won't let you change the letter of a
system (or boot or page) volume/disk and when I tried to
leapfrog by booting from the new disk with the old still
in place, once I changed C to something else and tried
rebooting, XP hung up. I had to use Safe Mode to get
access again and now the old drive is back to being C
again.

I've not found any articles so far that help with this so
I suspect I'm out of luck. Are there any expert ideas out
there?

Thanks,

Bill

 

[I'm Dan]

I'm trying to replace my old 20GB drive with a
120GB drive and I want to avoid a clean reinstall
of XP and all of my apps, etc. I've tried using Data
Lifegard Disk-to-Disk Copy which came with my
new WD drive and it seems to work OK. However,
I have not been able to figure out how to get the
new drive to assume the drive letter "C".
...(snipped)...

This actually occurs more often than you might think -- usually when you've
committed one of two errors: (1) you let old-XP see the new disk before
making the clone/copy, or (2) you let new-XP see old-XP the first time it
boot up. It's easy to commit error #1 if you prep (partition or format) the
new disk from within XP, and easy to commit error #2 if you try to leave the
old disk installed as a slave drive.

At this point, perhaps the easiest way to fix it is to remove the old disk
completely and install the new disk as master, get a Win98 boot floppy
(download one from bootdisk.com if you need to), boot from the floppy,
execute the command "fdisk /mbr", remove the floppy, reboot from the hard
disk, and see if XP now comes up as drive C:.

What this does is erase the DiskID, a 4-byte code in the MBR, thus
invalidating XP's record of previously assigned drive letters and forcing XP
to start over with fresh drive letter assignments. Win98 didn't know about
the DiskID, so the fdisk command has the effect of erasing it. The similar
"fixmbr" from the XP recovery console is "smart enough" not to do that, but
in this case we want it erased, so we take advantage of the fact Win98
didn't know about DiskID's.

BTW, if you want to put the old disk in as a slave, it's okay, but not until
after new-XP has booted up at least once and rebuilt its drive table with
itself as C:.

 

[Bill]

I have to say you sound like you know what you're talking
about. Thanks for the info. I'll give it all a try and
repost when I see how it works.

Thanks again.

Bill

 

[Bill]

Dan -

Your advice worked nicely. Thank you again. I didn't know
anything about the MBR format or the DiskID and that
seemed to do the trick.

Bill

 

[I'm Dan]

Your advice worked nicely. Thank you again. I didn't know
anything about the MBR format or the DiskID and that
seemed to do the trick.

Thanks for letting us know it worked for you. This undocumented trick was
identified and detailed here in the newgroups a year ago by Michal Kawecki,
and I've since found it enormously useful and deceptively simple on numerous
occasions. The only caveat is that it only works if you're trying to reset
your system disk to the letter C:, but your opening post revealed that was
exactly what you were trying to do.