Moving an XP Pro installation to a new hard drive

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From: Joshua Beall (jbeall_at_donotspam.remove.me.heraldic.us)
Date: 10/29/04 

Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 21:58:25 GMT

Hi All,

I have a machine that has totally run out of space. It was a mistake in the
first place to have such a small drive in there (4gb), but it was intended
to be only used for web surfing, email, and possibly some MS Office work. I
happened to have all the spare parts on hand to build this machine, and the
biggest drive I had lying around was 4gb.

A few years have passed, and now we're constantly having space problems. I
bought an 80gb WD drive, slaved it in, and used the WD utility that came
with the drive to copy the entire partition to the new drive. Then I pulled
the old 4gb drive out, set the 80gb to be the master (cable select,
actually - and it correctly shows up as the primary master). Wouldn't boot.
Ok, not too surprising, I figured I would have to fixmbr and fixboot. I
stuck the XP Pro CD in, loaded the recovery console, did a fixmbr, and then
fixboot.

Now things started to get hairy. I got an error stating "FIXBOOT cannot
find the system drive, or the drive specified is not valid". Uh oh. Tried
"fixboot c:", and that reported success. However, when I rebooted the
machine, it didn't work. Looks on IDE-0 for boot information and says "not
found."

So, what now? Is there no way to copy everything over to the new drive and
just chuck the old one? I can also leave it in as a slave, if that works.
But I want to get the system running off the new drive, so the system drive
has some free space on it. How do I do this?

Thanks for any help!

Sincerely,
  -Josh

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Moving an XP Pro installation to a new hard drive
    ... > Office work. ... > fixmbr, and then fixboot. ... Looks on IDE-0 for boot information and says ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)
  • Moving an XP Pro installation to a new hard drive
    ... actually - and it correctly shows up as the primary master). ... Ok, not too surprising, I figured I would have to fixmbr and fixboot. ... Looks on IDE-0 for boot information and says "not ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • Re: W2KPro loads but no icons/taskbar show.
    ... but fixboot & fixmbr did ... but I guess I'll try to run chkdsk ... >How about free disk space? ...
    (microsoft.public.win2000.general)
  • Re: Moving an XP Pro installation to a new hard drive
    ... >> with the drive to copy the entire partition to the new drive. ... >> Ok, not too surprising, I figured I would have to fixmbr and fixboot. ... >> But I want to get the system running off the new drive, ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)
  • Re: Moving an XP Pro installation to a new hard drive
    ... >> with the drive to copy the entire partition to the new drive. ... >> Ok, not too surprising, I figured I would have to fixmbr and fixboot. ... >> But I want to get the system running off the new drive, ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)