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How to copy a hard drive in XP?

T

ThatDumbGuy

Senior member
If I try to copy the main drive straight up, there are a few files that won't copy cause they are in use. I've used the DOS boot disk, but they won't detect my NTFS Drives. I've used partition magic 7, and it copied but the copy of the drive kept hanging at the welcome screen. Im upgrading my hard drive, and don't want to lose all my data, anyone have any ideas?
 
Ghost 2002 worked for me... with one caveat. It wont write an image to an ntfs drive. So you'll have to write it to a fat32 drive or cdr (which didn't work on my lite-on 1210). I had extra space on my drive so I just partitioned some out and made it fat32 for this purpose.

Also, with ghost 2002, you can send the image across a peer-to-peer network, which I also tried for my laptop, with good success.
 
I have seen a similar problem with the welcome screen on Win2K, please let me know how it is in XP.

The registry identifies each drive and assigns a drive letter. When you ghost and boot from the new copy, the OS detects that the drive is different and assigns a different drive letter. You can change the letter (search on Microsoft's knowledge base for chaging drive letter) if you can get the thing to boot. Hwoever, the boot sequence is cut short because a file is expected to be on c: and it isn't on the new c: (definately a MS bug).

Before you ghost, run regedit and search for the data value "winlogon.exe" (uncheck seaching kets and values to improve search speed). It would appear somewere (and if I remembered where) with an explicit path including c:\winnt. Change the C:\ to %SystemRoot%. The ghost and it would be OK.
 
The easiest way for a complete HDD copy is Drive Copy 4.0 (Powerquest.) You do it from its own DOS boot disk . . . it handles mixed FAT32, 16 and NTFS with no problem. Since it does it from its own DOS prompt, it does not care what OS you have installed. It will now handle drives/partitions up to 80 GB.
 
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