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Transferring a system to a new hard disk

richardm

Philosopher
richardm
Joined
Aug 6, 2001
Messages
9,248
Hi-

I've got an old PC here with a tiny C Drive, and a huge D drive (the D Drive was added after the original system was built). The whole machine is hopelessly constrained by the titchiness of the disk the Windows XP OS is installed on.

What I'd like to do is find a way to transfer the entire contents of the C Drive to the D Drive, replace the C Drive with a nice new big one, and then shunt the original contents back onto it, without the pain of reinstalling the whole lot from scratch.

I'm sure I've heard tell of bits of software that will let me create images and copy them around (usually onto CD IIRC). Is there anything that will let me do this?

Thanks!
 
You could try installing the big drive, formating it, the at a command prompt of C:\ typing

XCOPY /S /E /H /C /K *.* E:

where E: is your new drive. This should copy every file from C: to E: including hidden & system files - except the window swap file. After this is done, you should be able to remove the old drive c and replace it with the drive e (after turning off the computer of course) and it should boot up normally with everything in the right place.

This has worked for me under W95 & W98. I have not tried it under XP.
 
I've used Norton Ghost for this type of job. But lately I prefer to reinstall everything periodically (like whenever I change a motherboard or a hard disk), which leads to a "cleaner" system and also helps me realize that I don't really need the loads of stuff that I've been installing like mad.
 
El Greco - I think that Ghost is what I was thinking of. When I say "I have a computer", it's actually my father's - I did suggest a reinstall initially, but he blanched a bit at that :D

I must admit it never occurred to me that something as simpe as XCOPY would do the trick (perhaps it can't - I'll take a look at xxcopy, thanks!) I might just give it a go. Since the disk is being pulled out and replaced, it won't do any harm (I can always shove it back in again).

Thanks, all!
 
I did this quite sucessfully using Partition Magic. I was tempted to use Norton Ghost, but it seemsed like PM was the way to go...
 
I like PM/Drive Image, too.

Minor cautionary tale about PM:

If you plug a USB (or other plug&play) hard drive in while it's running, say because you're getting ready to copy one drive to another, it may get 'confused' and volunteer to repartition/reformat the wrong drive based on the settings currently on-screen. It will give you some warnings about an 'unexpected size'. Heed them.
 
richardm said:
Hi-


What I'd like to do is find a way to transfer the entire contents of the C Drive to the D Drive, replace the C Drive with a nice new big one, and then shunt the original contents back onto it,

Thanks!
Click to expand...

I heartily recommend PowerQuest's Drive Copy utility, which has been assimilated into Symantec's Norton Ghost.

Instead of moving C to D, just buy the new hard drive and copy directly from your old C to the new drive...as an exact duplicate of your old C drive. Ghost can do this for you very quickly and very easily. http://www.powerquest.com/sabu/ghost/ghost_personal/

If you buy a Western Digital drive, their bundled utility will also make an exact duplicate for you, and it's just as simple as using Ghost. http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp#dlgtools

I'm not sure what other hard drive companies include in their utilities these days.


Luceiia
 
I'm a service manager for a PC repair company. We use Ghost all the time. Ghost your drive onto a CD/set of CDs then install new drive and boot from the CD you've created. Doddle. (At least that's what the chaps at the sharp end tell me.)
 
Much simpler to mount both drives at the same time and do the direct copy/verify. My experience with burning the CDRs has been spotless, but RESTORING from those CDRs has been, let's say less than spotless.

My basic all around recommendation is simply to perform backups to a dedicated USB2 or IEEE-1394 based hard drive. For this, use robocopy (or rsync), and do an archive (just copy newer files) and a seperate mirror copy (copy newer/purge files that no longer exist) of the files you want to preserve, and occasional drive image backups of just the bootable part of your computer, which will be very small. This covers the case where you need to restore, and the case where you accidentally deleted something you needed two weeks ago.

ABOVE ALL, partition your hard disk so the bootable stuff is on one partition, and most of your data/work is on another. If/when Windows is thoroughly pooched, you only need to stomp the windows half of the drive with a drive image restore. The windows partition only needs about 8GB to give it tons of space for programs and swap and junk. The data partition can be the rest of the hard disk.

If you're not actively backing up or restoring, unmount and switch the backup drive OFF. The backup time varies, according to how long it's been between backups, and what large files may have changed, but generally only takes three to five minutes, which makes it something that you are prone to do more often than not.

Backup.bat
set mflags=/MIR /xo /R:0 /A-:R
set aflags=/E /xo /R:0 /A-:R
set dst=k:
set mirror=%dst%\Backup\Mirror
set archive=%dst%\Backup\Archive
set recover=%dst%\Backup\Recovery

@echo Recovery Backups
robocopy %aflags% "E:\Archives\Recovery" %recover%
robocopy %aflags% "C:\Config" %recover%\Config
robocopy %mflags% "C:\Documents and Settings\dave" "%recover%\dave"

@echo Mirror Backups
robocopy %mflags% "E:\CVS" %mirror%\CVS
robocopy %mflags% "C:\Program Files\GNU\WinCvs 1.3\Settings" %mirror%\CVS\Settings
robocopy %mflags% "D:\My Documents" "%mirror%\My Documents"
robocopy %mflags% "D:\Mail" %mirror%\Mail
robocopy %mflags% "D:\Work" %mirror%\Work
robocopy %mflags% "D:\Jakks" %mirror%\Jakks

@echo Mirror Other Junk
robocopy %mflags% "D:\Games" %mirror%\Games
robocopy %mflags% "E:\CD-IMAGE" %mirror%\CD-IMAGE
robocopy %mflags% "E:\Download" %mirror%\Download
robocopy %mflags% "E:\Movies" %mirror%\Movies
robocopy %mflags% "E:\Music" %mirror%\Music

@echo Archive Backups
robocopy %aflags% "E:\CVS" %archive%\CVS
robocopy %aflags% "D:\My Documents" "%archive%\My Documents"
robocopy %aflags% "D:\Work" %archive%\Work
robocopy %aflags% "E:\Archives\OldWork" %archive%\OldWork
robocopy %aflags% "D:\Jakks" %archive%\Jakks
echo.
echo.
@echo Backup VMWare data?
pause
robocopy %mflags% "D:\VMWare" %mirror%\VMWare

/dave/bin/backup
#! /bin/bash
# Backup key folders with rsync to /mnt/removable
mount /backup
backuppath=/backup/backup
backupparm=-av
if [ -d $backuppath ]; then
echo "Backup drive mounted."
# Remove some junk
rm -f /home/dave/.mozilla/default/g1jpc01s.slt/Cache/*
# Archives
mkdir -p $backuppath/archive
rsync $backupparm /home/dave/ $backuppath/archive/dave
# Mirrors
mkdir -p $backuppath/mirror
rsync $backupparm --delete /home/dave/ $backuppath/mirror/dave
mkdir -p $backuppath/recovery
rsync $backupparm --delete /etc/ $backuppath/recovery/etc
else
echo "Backup drive not mounted."
fi

For me, since I normally run Windows under a user account, I log on as administrator, and the backup.bat has its own desktop shortcut there, as does the antivirus and spyware junk. The user account doesn't have the privileges to install/uninstall/patch things, and that's the way I like it, especially when browsing the web. Soon all my windows stuff will be living in a virtual machine, so I can just revert the virtual drive image file when something hokey happens.
 
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