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Cloning the hard drive in Windows

G

graemenz

Member

Hi

I have about 10 partitions on an 80GB hard drive with Windows XP. Due to the fact that C drive is almost full I have installed a 160 GB Seagate drive and used DiscWizard to copy the partitions on the first drive to the new drive. That all completed ok. I then assigned in the BIOS that the secondary hard drive should now be the boot drive but when I started the computer, Windows had drives C, E, F ... L still assigned to the smaller drive and had assigned letters N, O, P ... to the new drive.

From looking in Windows support, it seems Windows doesn't let you reassign the letter of a system partition.
kb307844

but I found an article here
Change system drive letter

Suppose I disable the smaller hard drive in the BIOS - would Windows then assign the letter C to the first partition on the new drive. i.e. how do I make the new drive take over from the old drive, and if possible, with the old drive still enabled and usable.

TIA
 
Do it the easy way ... you now have 2 drives, right ? ? ? Leave all your data and such on the new drive and just let Windows have the 80GB for the OS itself (or even resize it down to about 50GB for XP) .. That should work fine and it will make your backups and images much easier to do. And while it was your choice to get a 160GB drive, nowadays, a 500GB or even 1TB can be had for very reasonable costs.
 
That's a good idea, thanks!

How do I resize the C partition on the first drive - can DiscWizard do that?

I also wanted the second drive to be bootable so if the first drive fails (it's five years old) I don't have any down time. DiscWizard said it copied the Master Boot Record to the new drive but my computer won't boot from it - when I try to, it slowly writes a bunch of "9"s to the screen. I have a Linux boot loader on my first drive (Lilo I think) and it boots into Windows by default. Maybe DiscWizard didn't know how to copy that over to the new drive.

Thanks.
 
You need a program like Partition Magic or similar to resize the partition. Acronis Disk Director Suite can also do this as well as make an Image or a Clone of one drive to another. You need to Clone your C Drive to the new one if you want the new drive to be bootable. But it is not recommended to have 2 bootable drives connected at the same time, as I think this will confuse wiindows.
Others with more experience in this area may offer better ideas. I would just make an Image of the C drive and store it on the new drive to restore from in case of a failure on the C drive. Not sure if Disc Wizard can do resizing. You can also look for a program called Gparted .. said to be free and very good
 
you can use Gparted to partition your drive. it's free and boots from its own CD. Gparted can also be found in the free SystemRescueCD suite. SRCD allows you to partition and image/ghost your drive. so pick your favourite.

both options are 100% free and reliable.... just make sure you run a scandisk and defrag before you start messing with partitioning.
 
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