Moving XP installation to another drive

[Ummon]

I have some computers I initially set up with rather small drives (8 and 20 gig, respectively - what I had on hand) and have gotten some larger ones and would like to move the installations to those. Particularly in the 8gig case, it's really slow booting and might be slower with system tasks. Can this be done easily?

[waveryder]

Can this be done easily?

Yes! Get yourself a copy of Norton Ghost and clone the drive onto the new one. This is only viable if the new drive is going into the same machine. Winxp goes crazy when there are MB and proc hardware differences using cloned drives.

[slsimon]

I have some computers I initially set up with rather small drives (8 and 20 gig, respectively - what I had on hand) and have gotten some larger ones and would like to move the installations to those. Particularly in the 8gig case, it's really slow booting and might be slower with system tasks. Can this be done easily?

Better yet, do a google search for hirens boot cd!  Boot to the cd once you have burned the ISO image onto a blank disc and you will find that there are many, many choices of nice utilities to use.  They all are categorized.  Look for the disk cloning category and find what you need in there.  I believe Norton Ghost is part of the package.  There truely are some nice utilities in there.  Good luck.  Thanks, Shane

[gonzo90017]

Better yet, do a google search for hirens boot cd!  Boot to the cd once you have burned the ISO image onto a blank disc and you will find that there are many, many choices of nice utilities to use.  They all are categorized.  Look for the disk cloning category and find what you need in there.  I believe Norton Ghost is part of the package.  There truely are some nice utilities in there.  Good luck.  Thanks, Shane

I usually use Acronis True Image.

[EVEGames]

Yes! Get yourself a copy of Norton Ghost and clone the drive onto the new one. This is only viable if the new drive is going into the same machine. Winxp goes crazy when there are MB and proc hardware differences using cloned drives.

Ghosting a hard drive and then plugging the newly Ghosted drive into a completely different machine may have its pitfalls, but they can be overcome.  In my experience, they key is to NOT connect the newly Ghosted hard drive into the target machine until you are certain that the Master Boot Record (MBR) on the target drive has been reinitialized.  It is an option within Norton Ghost to copy the MBR, but I have found that even if I disable this option, I sometimes still have trouble getting the Ghosted hard drive to boot into Windows on a different machine.  Perhaps others have had better luck with this option.

My solution, which is COMPLETELY archaic and outdated  , is to take the newly Ghosted drive, pop it into a machine that has a 3 1/2" floppy drive (set BIOS to boot from floppy FIRST), boot up the computer with a DOS boot disk, and then run the following command from the command line: GDISK 1 /MBR
It should only run for a few seconds, then echo back something about the MBR being reinitialized.  At this point, the hard drive is ready to be transplanted into any computer, and it should boot right into Windows on the first try.  Note that GDISK is not standard issue for boot disks, it is basically Norton's proprietary version of FDISK, so you may have to hunt down a copy and make room for it on your boot disk.

Just keep in mind, if your source and target machines have different motherboards, peripherals, etc, the first time you boot up on the target machine, you will most likely be running with the wrong set of drivers.  So task #1 should be to get the old drivers uninstalled (often needed for video drivers) and the correct drivers installed.  Think mobo chipset software, onboard sound driver, LAN driver, especially video driver.

Last comment, in response to your initial post Ummon, copying an XP installation from a smaller drive to a bigger one (using Ghost or any other method) will not necessarily result in a speedier boot time or better performance.  Any performance problems you have on that 8GB drive will also be on your new 80GB drive.  The only boost you might see is from the hard drive itself (faster seek times / bigger cache).

Good luck!
-EVEGames

[loadman]

Better yet, do a google search for hirens boot cd!  Boot to the cd once you have burned the ISO image onto a blank disc and you will find that there are many, many choices of nice utilities to use.  They all are categorized.  Look for the disk cloning category and find what you need in there.  I believe Norton Ghost is part of the package.  There truely are some nice utilities in there.  Good luck.  Thanks, Shane

I usually use Acronis True Image.

Ditto 

[Ummon]

This is on the same machine. Actually, it boots mega quicker because of what you said last. You can actually hear the old drive - plus it gets into what appears are snags when copying files and will click repeatedly.

Anyways, Seagate has a data migration program that is free, and apparently is a version of Acronis, but you need at least one Seagate drive on the system, and I don't have one. I went to hirens and pajanky or whatever but there were no downloads for the CD. I found the CD somewheres else, but I don't understand the formatting and I don't enjoy doing the ISO thing, so I bailed on that. What I ended up doing was copying the contents using a Western Digital program, but then I had to re-activate Windows. I swear, I can't see any security issue in Windows being able to just MOVE itself to another drive if it leaves the predecessor drive empty of installation. Weird.

[Ummon]

A sort of update on this project. I tried another (new) drive and used the trial version of Acronis migrate, but it just cloned the original disc causing Windows to jump up and need to be activated again. (Normally not a problem, but without telling the story on it, it is this time.) I thought it would actually move the installation, hence the word MIGRATE. Maybe it's because it's the trial version?