Upgrading from XP to Vista and moving to a new drive

[Guest]

Perhaps this problem was address already but I could not find an exact
circumstance: I have a computer that has a 80 gig drive with XP. I UPGRADED
to Vista Home Premium. I then installed a Larger 320 gig drive. With the
included software, I partition the 320 as one drive (partition). Because I
thought I could transfer everything over to the newer 320 gig drive, I
installed Vista on the newer drive. All my programs and everything is now on
the newer drive. Certain window files could not be moved. Also, w hen I
changed to boot to the newer drive; I read no OS found. How can I have
everything (totally) transferred to the newer. I tied several things but no
success. Anyone's help would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[Guest]

Perhaps this problem was address already but I could not find an exact
circumstance: I have a computer that has a 80 gig drive with XP. I UPGRADED
to Vista Home Premium. I then installed a Larger 320 gig drive. With the
included software, I partition the 320 as one drive (partition). Because I
thought I could transfer everything over to the newer 320 gig drive, I
installed Vista on the newer drive. All my programs and everything is now on
the newer drive. Certain window files could not be moved. Also, w hen I
changed to boot to the newer drive; I read no OS found. How can I have
everything (totally) transferred to the newer. I tied several things but no
success. Anyone's help would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[John Barnes]

With your new drive set as the boot drive, run the Vista install disk and do
a startup repair.

 

[Guest]

With your new drive set as the boot drive, run the Vista install disk and do
a startup repair.

 

[Guest]

I tried Mr. Barnes' suggestion but with the same results. Apparently Vista
does something to the original installation during upgrading that prevents
transferring to the newer drive. Thanks for your help however.

 

[John Barnes]

Does your machine have a hidden partition for recovery purposes you access
from the bios? Did you have the new drive as the first in boot priority, or
better, the only drive hooked up when you do the repair procedure?

 

[Guest]

Buddy,

How did you "move" the Vista partition to the new drive? If you just did a
copy from within Vista, it will not work. Most HD drives come with software
to move a complete image of one hard disk to another. The software that you
used to initialize and partition the new drive should have this option.
Anyway, you need to move the partition image to the new hard disk instead of
just the partition files. As you noted, some files will not copy over if they
are in use by the operating system.