Swapping everything to a new drive, need it to be bootable

[geno]

I have (2)15G HD's in my system right now that I'm intending on swapping out. The replacement drive is a single 120GB drive.

Now, I'm planning on installing the new HD first as a slave, then copying everything over to there. Basically I just want to mirror the drive that has my system files on it. I remember reading that I can copy everything over except for one file (swap file in the Windows dir?), I forget what that file is. Once everything is copied, I'll set my new drive to master and let it boot from there from now on.

Can someone just give me a quick refresher of what I need to do?

 

[KGB]

First... you don't want to COPY the HD you need to IMAGE the old to the new.

If this is a retail HD it will come with a disk that will allow you to partition & format the new drive AND image the old to the new.
If it is not a retail HD, visit the mfg's website and download the utilities you need.

Then again... there's always GHOST (my favorite).

 

[geno]

well I got the WD utils, it lets me ghost everything over, but the system stops booting at "Verifying DMI pool"

hm

 

[Willoughbyva]

What OS? Safemode (press F8 on start up).

 

[geno]

WinXP, but it doesn't even give me the chance to go into safe mode, the OS doesn't even begin to load.

The issue seems to be that I can't get the new drive to be recognized as bootable, even though the WD utility says so.

 

[Willoughbyva]

Not sure. I think on some drives there is a difference between the jumper settings for "single" and "master". Double check your drive jumper settings to make sure they are correct. Also if you have an older computer 120gb drives might not be fully supported. I forgot the ata ratings and the drive sizes supported, but if you have a machine that was made within the last year or two then that shouldn't really be a problem. Also double check the bios settings most of the time they are set to auto and will pick up the drive, you might try manually inputing the drive settings and see if that helps.

 

[geno]

My jumpers are ok. I got Partition Magic in hopes of being able to copy my partition over exactly as it is on my current HD, everything copied just fine and Windows began to boot with the exception of two things: Partition magic gave me a "batch file" error as WinXP started, and it let me continue normally. When the WinXP "Welcome" screen came up, it just sat there... hm

This shouldn't be as tough as I'm making it out to be, right? :frown:

 

[vietofmars]

Try repair install.