How to Copy Boot Drives

What you're looking for is called "cloning" software.

http://www.google.com/search?q=hdd+cloning

I don't have a specific recommendation, sorry.

If you buy the retail version from most major hard drive manufacturers they include software for cloning the drive, e.g. Maxtor includes MaxBlast 5 which, among other things will make a bit-for-bit copy of your current drive.

In the past I have Norton Ghost and it has worked great. When I say in the past it had to be 8 - 10 years ago, but I think there is still a current Norton Ghost offering.

Hi msm981w,

There is a chance that Microsoft may not recognise the new HDD, but this would take a simple phone call to rectify. I think you are trying to cover all occurrences, meaning if the cloning using the new HDD software does not work, you still have the alternative of starting afresh by loading XP onto your new drive?

It may pay you to Format the new drive with at least three divisions. Leave say 50 GBs for the XP and another couple at whatever size you want.

If you have two HDDs, as you know usually the original 'C' drive on the original HDD will be chosen as the default XP save area. I am not sure how it may work if you are copying all or cloning the original HDD to a new HDD.

It may automatically choose the new HDDs 'C' virtual drive when you remove the old drive after copying. And that may be what the cloning software that may come with the new HDD might do. .......... That is to switch your default save area from the old drive to the new?

Until you try it may not be that obvious?

But, ............ Are you sure you want to clone the old drive to the new or perhaps as you are starting anew, would it pay you to start as if the new HDD was the only drive you had?

Everyone builds up all kinds of rubbish, including bits and pieces of old defunct apps you no longer use or have, but parts of those programs are still on the original HDD and if you clone it you will be cloning all the troublesome stuff you no longer want as well as the stuff you still want to keep.

I had lots of problems with parts of old Antivirus apps not un-installing. By starting with a clean slate, even if you use the same apps that was part of XP, you will not have to sort out any problems now or later caused by parts of apps you may not even remember you had on the original HDD clogging the system up and preventing everything going smoothly?

If I had the choice I would start from scratch.

Just one other cautionary note. Although you may not realise it OE may not be transferable in situ, to the new HDD. I tried but the only way I could move it was to save all the folders, one by one because the whole OE would not allow me to transfer it to a new HDD. However, I will say here now, that I did not use any clone app to do the transfer. It might be possible with no problem if you go the clone route, I do not know. All other XP apps were transferable but not Outlook Express. OE does not have, as part of the system, a way of exporting anything in a straight forward way. The only way I could do it was to transfer parts by sending them from OE to say Word, then reassemble my OE on the new HDD It was and as far as I know, still is far from an ideal way of moving all OE from one HDD to another.

I hope you can understand my garbled explanation! But, there is nothing worse than assuming all the apps will transfer but, they don't. I have tried and had to figure out new ways for me to move all the files, folders and emails over to the new HDD. But it was the first time I had tried. Just read up on it first before you dive in the deep end, OK?

I wish you luck and I hope all goes smoothly.

Hello babybear:

Our post overlapped last night, and you made a very good point in that if the system has been operating for prolonged time between reloads, there's probably a lot of garbage. So unless it's absolutely necessary it is often better to do a fresh install.

What is really nice nowadays is the advent of cheap portable hard drives, and ultra large internal drives. Restoring from an image used to be a perilous process, a scratch on a DVD could lead to failure.

I am now making backup images on freshly loaded machines, windows seven even comes with the capability built in. Leave the fresh image alone on a portable hard drive, back up your files, and keep it updated image on a separate partition of your machine and life has become much simpler.

Hi YWROADRUNNER,

I appreciate your kind reply post OK?

I was to busy last night or was it this morning, to read other stuff after I had written my post.

Yes, every time an app or other program is trashed there is often part of it left behind which corrupts other stuff you move or load afterwards.

I can understand why or how someones favourite saved items like picture and music may need to be saved. But this can still be done by starting by installing XP or whatever else you have and start to transfer all the stuff you still use, rather than transfer stuff because it was part of a file or it might come in handy?

Given the choice I would choose several HDDs and that way, if one goes kaput, you can carry on working. I think perhaps drives of say 200 or 250 Gigs are handy, any larger and they become a liability when anything goes wrong with that drive. And ALL HARD DRIVES will FAIL! Just a case of when. And even if you are able to transfer stuff, with a one or two Tb drive, which is becoming the norm of late, it is a major job and needs serious planning? I had 4 Gbs on my first computer and thought it was a lot! But go too far the other way and managing a seriously large drive becomes a burden.

Good luck.

"I had 4 Gbs on my first computer and thought it was a lot!"

Babybear must really be young. I remember thinking we'll never use all that space when IBM came out with the XT with a 10MB drive.

It seems everyone has supplied you with some good advice, I've used ghost in the past and it worked well, also AS previously stated many manufacturers supply cloning software with a new hard drive.

There is also another way to accomplish your task, if you have a portable hard drive with sufficient space available you can make an image of your current hard drive, this could also be done on dvds but it's a pain.

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/

I recently had to do just that, for some reason I could not get the computer to clone drive to drive. Both ghost and the software I mentioned in the above link have the capability of cloning drive to drive or making an image of the hard drive.

Personally if I had valuable data I would image THE hard drive first, and then attempt a drive to drive clone. The nice thing about having a image besides a full backup and the ability to clone your hard drive from the image is that if something goes wrong you have as many to second chances as you want.

Either way I would image the drive. Portable hard drives are cheap nowadays, and large capacity internal drives are equally a bargain. I generally partition my hard drives, for multiple reasons. An image stored on a partition not involved with the operating system can be used to restore the computer in event the operating system is corrupted by virus or just a window's hiccup.

For some unknown reason this last week my operating system became corrupted, after playing with the computer for 1 hour trying to figure out the problem, I simply shut down booted from the recover CD and restored from the image on the separate partition. Instead of spending the day reloading the computer, I walked away and 45 minutes later I was running again.

ACRONIS

Super software.

Paragon Hard Disk manager will also do the job.

Run Xcopy from the command line.

It has been a long, long time since I swapped out hard drives, but (and you should check with your drive supplier), when I did, the hard drives had a DIP switch that allowed you to select the drive as a master or a slave. The master becomes the boot drive and the slave becomes an internal accessible drive (D:). As the new "master" drive will likely not come preloaded (just blank formatted drive), you will have to load your boot and operating system software before you can use it. But then, I'm not a computer-type guy, so, hopefully, others will be able to guide you better than I.

Greetings MSM98LW

I just last week cloned my XP boot drive using the free version of xxclone.

In the past I used maxblast but xxclone worked quicker.

When finished I boot the new drive to confirm operation then unplug it but leave it mounted for future use.

Doug

Thanks for all the replies and information.

I am taking Babybear's suggestion to start with a clean load of XP very seriously. I do have a lot of junk that I don't want or need. Also Windows seems to hide stuff unlike DOS, so I don't know what garbage is hiding someplace.

The google link had this link http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=418. It reviews cloning and some cloning tools. It's a good read. Norton Ghost appears best, but at $70 it's more than the drive cost!

Another suggestion was to use a backup and restore tool to an external drive. Even if I go with a clean load, I may go this route in the future just for CYA.

The HDD is supposed to get here tomorrow, so I'll have all Thanksgiving weekend to play with it. I'll let you know how it goes.

I decided to do a new install of Windows XP SP2 instead of ghosting.

I backed up most of the data on the failing hard drive onto an external HD. Replaced the old HD with the new one and installed XP. Everything went smoothly and my daughter hasn't complained (yet) that I lost her music, pictures or whatever.

After the install was done, XP checked for updates and installed 53!

Thanks for the help.

Well done.

You probably eliminated about 30 viruses and trojans in the process!

Hi msm981w,

Congrats on that!

Kinda makes you feel good well all goes as expected doesn't it?

Good luck!