Adding new hard drive in XP

Hi Wildfire,

Most, if not all, of the major hard drive manufacturers include drive
utilities software with purchase of a new hard drive (eg., MaxBlast for
Maxtor drives, Data Lifeguard Tools for Western Digital drives, etc.) and is
also available for free download........this software can be used to copy
the contents (including operating system) of the "old" hard drive to the new
one.



Regards,

--
Patti MacLeod
Microsoft MVP - Windows Shell/User

"Wildfire" <Wildfire@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:75137A5C-D517-4455-89D8-61E87176071D@microsoft.com...

> Is there a way in XP pro to add a new hard drive and copy all the
> information(including the operating system)to the new drive?
>
> James

Wildfire wrote:

> Is there a way in XP pro to add a new hard drive and copy all the
> information(including the operating system)to the new drive?
>
> James

I've just Norton Ghost in the past very successfully. In fact, since
drives are so cheap I've been using a second 80GB drive to backup my
primary 80GB drive. I just copy the entire drive over using Ghost.

Carlos

Wildfire wrote:

> Is there a way in XP pro to add a new hard drive and copy all the
> information(including the operating system)to the new drive?
>
> James

I tried to transfer my XP Pro installation to a new hard drive a couple
of times using the software that came with the hard drive. Western
Digital data lifeguard tools appeared to do the job, but when I removed
the old drive and tried to boot the new, it hung up just before getting
to the login screen. No user names, no keyboard response, no mouse
cursor. Just a blank field of blue. Up to that point, it looked like it
had worked.

That was about a year ago, I don't know if WD has updated the product
since then. I think I just re-installed. I did not succeed in the
partition copy.

More recently, I tried booting from a MaxBlast CD that came with a 120
GB Maxtor drive and running a partition copy. The transfer was too slow
to tolerate (about ~20 MEGA-bytes a minute). I didn't have the patience
to let it run overnight, so I don't know if it would have worked.

Ultimately I transfered XP to the new drive using the Backup.exe utility
that's part of XP Pro, using the Automated System Recovery procedure You
need a floppy disk, a separate hard drive or other large media to store
your backup file, and the original XP Pro CD. This works, but
unfortunately, it's good ONLY to create an exact copy of the original
system partition and to lay out the exact same partition structure of
your old drive whether you want to or not. If you want a different
partition layout, you need to do some more hard drive swapping and extra
steps with the command line DISKPART utility.

See the thread I started a couple of weeks ago "Procedure to expand
system volume XP Pro" if you want to avoid the problems I ran into.

You may want to just re-install from scratch.

Jim