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Help with move from old to new HDD!!

H

homestarmy

Diamond Member
On my XP Media Center 2005 PC, I was running a 120GB Maxtor drive, and now I have a 250GB WD drive that I am trying to put into it's place. I have tried many things which I will list below...

First, I tried to run WD's utility to copy ALL DATA from one disk to another. It finished, saying that it could not copy a few files, but they were supposedly unimportant, or something that windows would recreate itself. The drive was then set to master and all (was being detected properly as such), but it would not boot, it asks to insert system disk.

So then I looked into a ghost option. I used ghost to make an exact copy of the drive. It ended up giving me some kind of roughly 100GB partition with all of my data on it, but that still would not boot. I also made a ghost backup onto a third 160GB drive, but I don't see how I can get that to restore to the 250GB disk... any help with that?

Now I am using XP's backup function to make a complete backup to my extra 160GB drive, hoping to be able to restore it to the 250GB drive. I don't exactly know how I would go about restoring it, though. Would I need to install XP on the 250GB drive and then restore it? That just seems like a hell of a lot of work.

I would just do a fresh install, but that would lose a lot of custom things that I have set up, such as series recordings, etc. I would by all means not want to lose any of that.

There's gotta be a damn simpler way to get all of the data from my 120GB drive to my 250GB drive and maintain it's full capacity, why does it have to be such a pain in the ass? Why don't these utilities actually work?

Sorry for the frustration. Thanks in advance for any help you can give!
 
GHost is picky, and to tell the truth, as of late, we havnt had all that much success with it working. But in order to get it from the 160 to your 250, you need to make a ghost boot disk, boot to it, and tell ghost to do another disk to disk copy. id be curious to now what files it missed on the first copy attempt with the WD utility, and if you could do a repair install on the copied data, if it would even see it as a previousl installed copy of windows, basically have windows setup replace the vital files the copy operation obviously missed
 
This computer doesn't have a floppy drive also btw... It does have built in card readers though that I have set as A and B. Could I use a CF card as a floppy possibly?
 
not usually, CF dont have a real "file system", they do, but not in the same way a bootable device does. you can download bootable cd roms as well, theres one called Hiren's boot CD that should work for you, and has FDISK, and a boatload of other hard drive tools and diagnostics
 
i was actually able to get a cf card to work. i copied the drive once again, specifically choosing to include boot sector data. now it is sticking on 'buiilding DMI pool' when booting and will not go any further.

any suggestions?
 
Do you have any other drives on the same cable as the western digital? If not, change the jumper from master, to single drive. Western Digitals are picky about that. Not sure if that will help, just a possibility. I have partition magic 7 and thats what I use to do what you are trying to do. I have used it to succesfuly copy partitions to a new drive, and get it to boot right up, and then merge the extra free space in to the partition afterwards.
 
I have been careful about the jumpers. It is set as master because there is also a cd rom connected in the chain. I have also tried various ways, making sure the jumpers are set properly.

I am now using partition magic. I am trying to copy the partition, but at the end it is saying "The Partition may not be Bootable. Are you sure that you want to do this?"

Why is it saying that? What do I need to do to make it bootable? Am I selecting the wrong option?

I have deleted any partition on the 250GB drive. Then I click on Copy Partition. Then I choose the C: drive, then the partition to be copied from (the only one), then I choose the unallocated space on the 250GB drive, then it asks me if I want it to be Primary or Logical. I have been choosing Primary... is that ok? Then it also asks me if I want it to be hidden or unhidden... I don't understand that option at all. Then I click next and choose that I want the new partition to cover the entire space of the new drive.

No matter what I do, it seems to continue to give me that error!

Please help! What to do? I will try doing it even though it's giving me the error and see what happens...
 
Now I've tried to make the partition. It shows that it is made in seconds, but there is NO DATA ON IT!! WTF?

Also when I delete and try to copy another way, it brings up a window that says "moving past cylinder 1023", and then the partition may not be bootable message. WTF is cylinder 1023 and what does it have to do with anything?
 
I guess none of that really matters because it looks like the trial version will do nothing at all except pretent like it is going to work. Oh well, I'm in the process of buying a real copy anyhow now.
 
ok, i was able to get the data copied over. but now when i try to boot, it gets stuck at the blue win xp screen right before the desktop loads.

same thing happens when i try safe mode. any suggestions?
 
now i'm just thinking about saying screw it and starting from scratch, but my mce disk doesn't appear to be bootable, while my standard xp pro one seems to want to boot fine...

can i recover an mce install with an xp disk?
 
Yep, it's no. It's screwy how it offers to do so though... great programming huh?

Well actually it kinda does, it just takes you to regular XP.

So I got regular XP installed, then I intalled XP MCE over it (since my disk for some reason is not bootable). Then I go to put a couple of programs back and realize... ALL IT DID WAS UPGRADE TO SP2!! No MCE functions!!!

At this point, one might think that I am just stupid... well that is probably understandable, but you have no idea what I've been through... geez!

I had to leave (at least show up for second half of work at my weekend job) and it is now doing a fresh install of MCE (well, mostly fresh, it was ran through windows, so it could not be completely formatted because the setup files were on the partition). But at this point, I should be home free... except I need to reinstall all of my stuff and move everything over.

Anyone know how to locate/move data such as what series are being recorded etc from an old installation to a new one?

Thanks!

Wish me luck!
 
After using PM7 to copy over the partition, did you make the partition active? You have to do that to make it boot, and I suggest not having any other hard drives connected the first time you try and boot up. Also try safe mode the first time as well if it's locking up right before the desktop loads.
 
Yeah, I tried safe mode, unfortunately to no avail. I was SO CLOSE too!

I did end up just installing over and re-setting up all of my programs and the such (which is what I was trying to avoid, because there were reg hacks and things like that that needed to be done).

But I will be wanting to today or very soon to image my other hard drive on my main computer, so this information is great! I will be imaging my OTHER 120GB drive onto my 80GB drive, and then setting up my two 120GB drives in a RAID-0. I will then work off of the 80 until I get around to reinstalling windows on the RAID, or I will just image back from the 80 to the 2x120 RAID-0 setup. All of which should work properly, but as we can see, that is not always the case.

So, I don't believe I remember setting a partition as active, and I was not aware of this being necessary, or believe that I know how to do so. Can you please inform me?

I'm thinking that the problems that I had had something to do with going from a smaller disk to a disk over the 120GB limit. I don't have anything to back it up, but I have a feeling that things will likely be a good amount smoother going from the 120 to the 80. But going back from that to the 2x120 in the raid? Well, I guess we shall see!
 
You really just need to get a floppy drive and Norton Ghost 2003. If you make a bootable floppy with it, then boot off of it and select disk-to-disk copy from your old to the new, you'll find it will most likely work.

That's the only way i've had success doing mirroring. I've done it twice on my own machine for the last 2 hard drive upgrades i've done, i haven't formatted now in over a year!! 🙂
 
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