Please Help -- Copy WinXP harddisk to new drive

[Refurbit]

Help, I have WinXP installed on a Maxtor 40gig hardrive as my boot disk, which is going bad accroding to the the SMART boot test. I would like to copy/ghost the entire dist to a new 80gig WD drive so that I can avoid reinstalling WinXP and all my other APPs. Here's what I've tried so far

Norton Ghost, after ghosting the disk it appered to work but hung at the Windows splash screen. (I disconnected the original boot drive). I Connacted Norton and they said that this is a knowen problem. They suggested that I try the following

If the source drive is the same as the new destination drive then this
should work correctly. But if this drive is larger or a different
manufacturer, then you should use the Microsoft Sysprep tool on this
source drive first before using Ghost.
Sysprep can be configured to allow Windows XP to work around crucial
hardware differences between the source and destination machines which
may otherwise prevent booting.
So you will want to run Sysprep before you create your Windows XP
images.

I'M reclutant to do this as I have no experiance with this type of application

I've also tried the utlility programs that come with drive manufactures "MaxBlast" and WD program.

Any help would be grealty appreciated.

Regards
Kevin

 

[tigerwannabe]

can you still read the 40 gig drive? if so, i'd backup the crucial data first onto cds, then try the sysprep tool.

 

[MTDEW]

Powerquest Drive Image pro will allow you to make an image and restore it to a larger drive that isnt the same size as the original partition.

It'll say something like..... "destination partition is larger than source partition, do you want to expand the image to include the extra space on the destination partition?" and of course you'll choose yes.

If ya look around, you can get a copy of drive image pro pretty easily.

Other than that, if you're dead set on using ghost.

Create a partition on your 80gb hdd thats the same size as your original 40gb hdd, so ghost will restore the image on your new 80gb drive and wont complain about the difference in partition sizes.

If it was me, i'd get a copy of Drive Image Pro and Partition Magic, with these 2 programs, you'll have several options about how you'd wanna go about doin what ya want.

 

[Refurbit]

tigerwannabe thanks for the reply, I can still read the drive and I have backed up my data. I was hoping for some fool proof way to clone the disk over with out using the the Sysprep tool. Since I've never used the Sysprep tool before, I'm concerned that I might screw up my original boot disk in the process. But I guess at this point I might not have much to lose.

Regards
Kevin

 

[NogginBoink]

Do what Norton says.

On the WinXP Cd, in support\tools\deploy.cab is sysprep.exe and a bunch of help files.

Read the help files, then run sysprep according to the help files, then clone the drive.

OR: do a full backup of the drive, put in the new drive, install XP, do a full restore.

 

[Refurbit]

Thanks for replies, I give the Sysprep option a shoot

Regards
Kevin