RE: Moving an XP Pro installation to a new hard drive

From: Andrew E. (eckrichco_at_msn.com)
Date: 10/29/04 

Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 15:51:03 -0700

  First off,the WDigital utility wont copy xp 99% of the time,actually its
worth-
 less in xp.If the 4gb hd is ok,install as master,install the wd as slave on
the
 same ide chain,on start-up,enter the BIOS,install xp cd,boot to xp cd (adjust
 in BIOS if needed),then boot to cd,recovery,type:DiskPart In DiskPart delete
 the partition for the wd drive,create one,then press Esc,then type:FORMAT D:
 /FS:ntfs D:being wd,when its thru type:EXIT Let xp start,then go to run,
 type:XCOPY C:\*.* D: /c/h/e/k/r In the DOS window agree to all,when its
 thru,youre done,shutdown computer,switch the jumpers on hds.D: being wd,
 but the letter is substitutable,remember xp doesnt copy very well,if thiers
a
 problem,boot to cd,select,repair this copy of xp.

"Joshua Beall" wrote:

> 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
>
>
>