XP swapping (Ghost) boot drives

[SimMike2]

With Windows 98 it was easy to make images of your boot drive and copy them to your newest, fastest hard drive. With XP I am not so sure it is this easy. Here is some advice I read a few months ago in the XP beta newsgroups at Microsoft. Any comments are appreciated. I really like swapping my hard drives every few months or so to get drives out of the torture chamber that is your OS boot drive.

"to move a partition you must delete all but the Default values from XP registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices,

Now make the image and swap the drives. This means keep the 1st entry in the Mounted Devices registry which is default, but delete all the other entries on that screen. YMMV. Mounted devices will be rebuilt on boot."

 

[SimMike2]

Just wanted to reply to my own post, in the hope it helps someone else. I did like my post said and it works perfect. XP rebuilds the drives on reboot. I did this multiple times and it didn't trigger activation or anything else. My new drive was detected on the reboot, but XP didn't care that this new drive was now my boot drive. BTW, I still use FAT32.

 

[So]

I need to do exactly what you're describing, so I will ask, do you mean to delete everything else in the ENTIRE registry (seems drastic) or just the entries under "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices"?

 

[Bglad]

How interesting. Could you post a link to wherever you found these instructions. I'd like to read more.

 

[So]

bump for my question.

 

[NogginBoink]

This makes sense.

XP recognizes drives based on the drive signature in the MBR. If cloning the drive rewrites the signature, you'll have an orphan in this registry key.

 

[So]

just tried it, and on reboot, I got a Windows Product activation error. Is there anything you forgot to mention?

I went into regedit and deleted everything under Mounted Devices except default.