Transferring XP to a new drive

[imported_trajan]

I just bought an second hard drive and splurged on a WD Raptor 150gb. It's definitely noticeably faster, substantially faster for file moving/copying and I'm hoping faster in terms of load times, etc. Problem is, my rig currently has everything loaded onto a single 230gb drive, including XP...

Its been awhile since I had to reinstall XP but when I think about having to do it again (along with all my apps, games, patches, drivers, preferences, etc) I feel faint. Is there any way for me to transfer the OS and some or all of my apps?

I'm using exactly 150gb on the old drive right now, and a large amount of that is documents/data/deletable that I don't need to transfer, so the OS plus apps should fit with room to spare on the new drive.

Any suggestions? I've heard there are apps that will transfer the *entire* drive over, I would be willing to resort to that before doing manual reinstalls.. but preferably there's some way to just transfer the OS and apps. I've also never seen anything talking about moving from a larger drive to a smaller drive, so I'm wondering if that would be a problem, even if I shrink down the larger drive to fit on the smaller.

Thanks so much for any help!

 

[Cutthroat]

You can use imaging software, there are lots of choices, I personally use Acronis True Image Home. You can tell it to exclude certain files when it makes an image.

 

[imported_trajan]

Thanks for the tip, I just wanted to report back. I used Acronis and the whole process was a breeze.. I slimmed my old drive down just a bit so it would fit entirely on the new one without any additional tinkering, then ran through the clone drive wizard. Then booted off the new drive with a great deal of apprehension. It works! If the old drive wasn't disconnected right now, I would never believe I wasn't still working off it.

Thanks again.

 

[corkyg]

Cloning drives has ruled for over 10 years! 🙂