Installing & Formating a new HD in XP Pro

[Wheeler Dealer]

I just bought a new 60Mb Hard Drive for my PC. There is physically only room for 1 hard drive in my case, so I would like to make the new drive bootable and then copy all of the content (and registry entries) from my current hard drive onto my new one. Is it possible to do this? I have been able to format the new drive and assign a partition, but I cannot make that drive the system/boot volume.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[Kraeji]

I used partition magic and it would only let me copy NTFS partitions without changing the size. So if you dont mind having 2 partitions on your new drive you could use that. If you have fat32 then parition magic will do everything for you.

Do you have a spare 5 1/4 bay? you can install hard drives there too.

 

[TheWart]

I do not see why you just cannot hook it up into the 5 1/4 bay temporarily, and then go into windows after it is hooked up, copy everything over, then shutdown, take out the old one, then bootup.

 

[Wheeler Dealer]

That's exactly what I did, and it froze at the XP startup screen. I'm going to try and use partition magig and/or norton ghost today.

 

[GtPrOjEcTX]

Originally posted by: TheWart
I do not see why you just cannot hook it up into the 5 1/4 bay temporarily, and then go into windows after it is hooked up, copy everything over, then shutdown, take out the old one, then bootup.

It doesn't quite copy EVERYTHING over when you do that.

 

[kursplat]

voting for drive image . works great
good luck

 

[WeeWolf]

Yeah I would go with Drive image or Ghost either will work. I would not rely on a straight copy esspecially if it's done while the OS is running you will not get all of the necessary files if that's what you did I'm surprised it booted all the way to the splash screen.