A foolproof way to migrate a Windows boot drive?

[augiem]

Hi,

Does anyone know a program that will copy ALL the hidden files, etc of Windows and keep the OS bootable when moving it to a new hard drive? I've always had problems trying to do this. I know programs like Ghost and Drive image can copy drives, but they seem to require identical partition sizes or equivalent FAT systems.

I'm trying to copy a 2GB FAT 16 partition over to a 6GB NTFS partition (Windows just KEEPS GETTING BIGGER! -- My spacious 2GB partition is now down to 20 megs free even though I NEVER install ANYTHING to C, my swap file is on a different drive, and I constantly delete temporary files! Win2K has DOUBLED in size since my initial install with all the service packs, etc.)

Anyone have experience doing this? I do intend to reformat eventually, but I'm in the middle of an intense semester and absolutely need my system up and running right now. I'm having a lot of trouble using this system because of the small free space on C, so I got a 200GB WD Special Edition hard drive and want to move over to that without killing Windows.

Any tips will be greatly appreciated! Also, if you know about NTFS cluster sizes, see my post below this one.

Augie

My cluster size post

 

[bozo1]

nm

I was going to recommend the free utility from your drive manufacturer but I believe that just does entire drives, not individual partitions.

 

[augiem]

Originally posted by: bozo1
nm

I was going to recommend the free utility from your drive manufacturer but I believe that just does entire drives, not individual partitions.

Hi,

I actually did try Western Digital's program. It does allow you to copy individual partitions, but it got mad at me because one partition was FAT and the other was NTFS.

Augie

 

[augiem]

ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! I hate wasting hours upon hours trying to do these stupid things!

I tried Windows Backup, and it seemed like it was going to work, but then I found IT LEFT OUT A BUNCH OF SYSTEM FILES! Plus, I have no way to force it to copy the boot block or whatever else HIDDEN GARBAGE they have to cram in there.

 

[bsobel]

Does anyone know a program that will copy ALL the hidden files, etc of Windows and keep the OS bootable when moving it to a new hard drive? I've always had problems trying to do this. I know programs like Ghost and Drive image can copy drives, but they seem to require identical partition sizes or equivalent FAT systems.

Ghost certainly doesn't need identical partions or file systems, thats the whole point of the app....
Bill

 

[augiem]

Originally posted by: bsobel
Ghost certainly doesn't need identical partions or file systems, thats the whole point of the app....
Bill

Hmm, well, I did try Ghost 2003. When I selected my FAT drive C as the source, it would not let me select my NTFS drive as the destination -- it was totally greyed out.
I think I'm going to need some rogain after this...

Augie

 

[bsobel]

Where you trying to store the image onto an existing NTFS partition, or do the drive copy and create one? Also, you can just use ghost to do the drive to drive copy and then run convert.exe from windows to swap the drive to NTFS.

Bill

 

[augiem]

Originally posted by: bsobel
Where you trying to store the image onto an existing NTFS partition, or do the drive copy and create one? Also, you can just use ghost to do the drive to drive copy and then run convert.exe from windows to swap the drive to NTFS.

Bill

I was trying to partition copy the whole partition to the NTFS partition.

The problem with converting FAT to NTFS is that 1) It uses 512 byte clusters instead of 4K and 2) The NTFS table becomes fragmented all over the partition instead of being one contiguous chunk at the beginning of the drive. It just degrades performance.

Thanks for trying to help, by the way!

Augie

 

[bsobel]

I was trying to partition copy the whole partition to the NTFS partition.

It sounds like you setup ghost to store a copy of the image (the actual .gho files) intead of doing the partition copy. Thats the only thing I can think of that would explain why you ran into that.

The problem with converting FAT to NTFS is that 1) It uses 512 byte clusters instead of 4K and 2) The NTFS table becomes fragmented all over the partition instead of being one contiguous chunk at the beginning of the drive. It just degrades performance.

Your refering to the MFT being contigous, and your right, it will be somewhat more fragmented if you convert. Btw, the MFT zone is actually in the rough middle of the rive, not the beginning (so the head has a maximum of 1/2 the drive to seek if the mft itself doesnt' hold all of the file data).

Good luck!
Bill

 

[augiem]

It sounds like you setup ghost to store a copy of the image (the actual .gho files) intead of doing the partition copy. Thats the only thing I can think of that would explain why you ran into that.

No, that's not the problem. I've found out a bit more info... I tried again, this time I made an image first, and then tried to write the image to my NTFS drive. Again, the 6GB NTFS partition I wanted to write to was greyed out, BUT the 2GB NTFS partition with 64K clusters I made for my swap file was selectable! It may have something to do with the cluster size.... But what's wierd is that my FAT C: is 32K clusters, where my 2GB NTFS is 64K clusters.... The 6GB NTFS where I want to copy it to has 4K clusters.

I'm gonna try reformatting the 6GB using 32K clusters...

Augie

 

[BmXStuD]

1.get a program called PArtition magic
2. press the copy partition button.
3. copy it to the right drive
4. right click on the new drive and go to properites than click SET ACTIVE
5. let it do its thing. than it should copy the partition and set the new drive active and making the old one non bootable meaning the new one will boot it. I just done this the other day like last thursday.

 

[augiem]

Hi,

Thanks for the tip. I had partition magic a few years ago, but I didn't like it at all. I hate programs that add proprietary junk to the boot block, etc. It's such a mess. If all else fails, I guess I'll try that, but I don't really like the prospect of spending more $$$ on that program.

In other news, I am currently trying the approach of using the Ghost browser to extract the files instead of doing a partition copy. While I was able to extract all the files, when I tried to boot Win2K, I got the error message "NTLDR is missing" ... I'm assuming this is some kind of boot block thing. GRRR... I'll try to research it.

Augie

 

[augiem]

Ok, I'm going to puke here. I quit. I hunted down stuff on NTLDR. One place's solution was to boot the Win2K cd and run system repair on it. ... I tried using the manual repair console to fixboot and it supposedly replaced the boot sector.... Reboot and still get the same message. Then I tried to use the automatic repair and it tells me it cannot find any copies of windows 2000 on the drive. @#$@#$#@ . So I try someone else's solution and try to sys c: the drive with a WinME boot disk ... BAD COMMAND OR FILE NAME... Since when did they take sys off the boot disks?

I totally give up. I have wasted way to much time on this.

 

[Confused]

Take old hard drive
Take new hard drive, remove all partitions
Copy partition from old hard drive to new hard drive, and resize partition as needed with Ghost
Rinse and repeat for any other partitions


Seems to me like you have already set up partitions on your new drive, when you should just be letting Ghost do it all (and it does it quite well, and easily)

Confused

 

[augiem]

Originally posted by: Confused
Take old hard drive
Take new hard drive, remove all partitions
Copy partition from old hard drive to new hard drive, and resize partition as needed with Ghost
Rinse and repeat for any other partitions


Seems to me like you have already set up partitions on your new drive, when you should just be letting Ghost do it all (and it does it quite well, and easily)

Confused

I don't know what version of Ghost you are using (I'm using Ghost 2003 that came with System Works), buy I see nothing to let me resize partitions. I don't think this would work for what I want to do anyway. I want my new drive to be a 6GB NTFS partition with 4k clusters, not a 2GB FAT w/32K clusters (as it is currently). Partition Magic can resize partitions, but I don't see any functionality in Ghost to do this.

Plus, Ghost just plain REFUSES to copy the partition to any drive except my 2GB NTFS drive. I tried to force it by using the windows GUI to do the partition clone, but when it rebooted to DOS it gave me an error saying something to the effect of "destination partition is too large to clone source"

Augie

 

[augiem]

bump 4 help