Move XP to New Drive--Too many Answers

Well, my son wants to move XP (Professional) to his other hard drive. He and I have done a lot of searching and there is sure no shortage of ways to do it. The problem is finding the right one. He has an additional problem.

His small drive is where XP is installed. It is very slow. Years ago he installed a larger drive and started using it as a data drive. It is about 50% full of various data.

He would like to make the larger drive his C: drive becaiuse it is so much faster. Most procedures for moving XP to a new drive use cloning which will overwrite what he has on the large drive.

Is there a way to do the move XP and all the program files and retain what is on the large drive?

Thanks in Advance,

Pete

 

If you set up a partition in the spare space on the large drive you can clone the old drive to the new partition on the larger drive, as long as the partition on the larger drive is the same size or larger, in most cases.

This partitioning can be done in windows and the cloning can be done with a number of tools.

 

Great solution.

I'm a little rusty on cloning. Do I have to make the new partition the same size as the disk I'm cloning from? I seem to remember I did a clone once and was left with a "hole" in my drive where the clonee partition ended up as small as the first drive.

I plan to use Acronis Trueimage to do the clone.

 

As long as the space for the new partition is the same or larger than the partition you are trying to clone then you will be fine.

 

So if the new partition is larger than the first drive it will remain larger rather than be a true clone? Just checking.

Also, I just brought up the Trueimage help and they talk about "unallocated" space. Is that just part of the big drive that has no data on it or is it space that was not put in a partition when the disk was installed? This disk was never partitioned or it is just one big partition I guess.

Thanks again,

Pete

 

I am not sure if Acronis resizes the cloned partition to fit the space or if it will just leave the spare space unallocated. If it does then you can expand the new partition later on.

You will have to resize the existing partition to make space for the clone. Unallocated space is space that is not part of a partition and does not have a file system on it.

 

You won't be able to boot this clone without creating a MBR and boot configuration file on the cloned disk, and setting the BIOS to boot to it. You can do this in the recovery console of an XP installation disk with the FIXMBR and FIXBOOT commands. Once the clone has been created I think it would be advisable to physically remove the smaller disk while setting this up.

If these disks are IDE you will also need to switch the Master and Slave jumpers.

 

If you use Acronis to copy the boot sector you will have no problems and will not need to do this.

 

Some further thoughts on this -

You will need a partitioner, as XP can't do what is required unaided. You could use EASEUS Partition Master to shrink the data partition and move it to the end of the drive leaving a minimum of 20GB unallocated space at the start. You would also need to create the Easeus bootable CD.

Next, as Acronis only clones whole disks, not selected partitions, you would use it to create an image of the current system drive and store the image file in the data partition, providing there is still sufficient space available.

At this point, in order to obviate risk of conflict, I would physically remove the current XP drive, and boot to the EASEUS CD to restore the image file to the unallocated space, including track 0 in the restore - the MBR. You may need also to pop the drive out to set its jumper to Master or it won't boot, and change the BIOS boot order if necessary.

I think it should now boot to the cloned XP partition, and if all is OK just set the jumper on the small drive to slave and reinstall it.

This isn't a straightforward operation and unexpected issues are likely to arise so do ensure there is another box available to ask for help should you need it.

Good luck!

 

errata - you need to boot to your Acronis Rescue CD to do the restore, not to the Easeus CD of course, so make sure you have created one.

 

This information is totally incorrect. Moving a whole partition across the drive may take days, is totally unnecessary, and will probably fail, leaving a corrupted partition that will be almost impossible to recover. I know, I have had this happen to me before.

You are correct about the cloning method, however.

Also, hard drives in slave mode can boot, I have one right here that can. As long as the BIOS knows which drive to choose first, it will boot successfully, whatever position on the cable the drive is in.

 

Really? Well the clone certainly won't boot if it's in a partition BEHIND the data partition will it? Perhaps you would care to explain to the OP how to get around that.

Fact is collinsl you have provided completely inadequate and incorrect advice on how to approach this problem, yet clearly resent having it corrected and amplified. As to moving a partition taking days, well that is preposterous, but if the OP could remove stuff to DVD before the repartitioning that would ease the situation no end.

 

I personally believe that none of the information I have provided here is incorrect, however if you have evidence to the contrary then please PM me with it as this is no place for an argument such as this.

Anyway, as long as the MBR shows where the partition is to boot from I do not see where it is on the disk mattering. As long as the MBR is written afresh rather than copying it from the old drive, it should be fine.

 

OP, I take it that you would prefer to do this cheaply or free, in which case you can use GParted.

GParted will be included in a Linux Live CD (Puppy my favourite. 100Mb download, runs entirely in ram - you can take the cd out at the Linux desktop)

Resize the data partition on larger drive and move it (data partition) up the HD and then copy the active ie bootable partition with the o/s onto the space created.

Here are walkthoroughs

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/larry/resize/resizing.htm

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/larry/move/move.htm

Don't forget to check that the XP partition which you copy has an Active flag ie is bootable.

You have not mentioned partition sizes but I can't see it taking too much time.

There are other paying solutions which I have used; BiNG (excellent), Partition Magic (nice interface) and for cloning purposes Images for Dos (spartan interface but excellent). These are all run from a command prompt and do not need to be installed. I have not used Acronis personally so cannot comment.

Moving / resizing / copying partitions can be dangerous. As always backup any important data prior to any such work.

Good Luck

 

rolleyes

@risk_reversal I assumed from #3 that he already has Acronis. If not he could also use EASEUS Todo, another free proven imaging tool.

 

Well, this is a lot of info. It will take me a little while to work through it all. I did find that I have an old version of PartitionMagic installed on this computer. I can see that it should work to split that data drive into two partitions. It doesn't work over my network (to get to the data drive on my son's computer) so I'll have to move the data drive to this computer to do the partition. Acronis is also installed on this computer so I would have to move the old XP drive WITH the data drive to this computer to do the cloning. They are IDE drives and this computer is SATA but I can swap out the DVD/CDs and put his IDEs in there.

I'm starting to think of another alternative. Sometime in the past we actually installed XP on the data drive and his machine sort of dual boots, asking him which XP he wants. He always boots to the old XP because there are no Program files installed on the "data drive". We thought at the time that the task of installing all the program files on the data drive and restoring all the other setup stuff was going to be really tough. But it might be easier than this cloning process.

I have to think about it.

Thanks

Pete

 

You could go down that road, but face getting all those apps up and configured again! Ugh!

Why not just install Acronis and a partitioning prog on son's XP? It should then be pretty straightforward. It would be a temporary infringement of the Acronis license of course, which you could avoid by using EASEUS Todo instead. I can vouch that it works satisfactorily.

 

Cloning / imaging the partition is going to be a lot faster than the alternative that is for sure with the whole process (depending on partition sizes) taking no more than 3 hours (as a good guess).

However, if you have never done it before then it certainly is a moderately daunting proceedure.

Good Luck

 

I'm thinking about the alternatives. I did some partitioning a few years ago and it took a few tries. I ran into problems like making a new partition larger than the disk to be cloned. Acronis made a pure clone and I lost the extra space. I had to mess around a lot to get the space back as I recall.

It may take a while before I work this out. I'll report here so others finding this thread will know the result.

Thanks:
Collins!
Earthling
risk_reversal