How to migrate XP Home to new HD?

Hi All; Need some help here. 12 year old daughters "C" drive, 20GB almost full and she needs more space. Bought her a new 80GB drive and want use it to replace the existing drive as boot drive.

Formatted and partitioned new drive using XP, new partitions designated by XP as "H" and "I ".

She has Drive Image 7 installed on her machine. By swapping drives around, making an image, restoring to partition "H" on new drive, set new drive as master at "0 ", machine goes to Windows logo screen and just sits there.

Also tried, using Drive Image 7's "Copy Drive" feature, got same results.

Google search shows me migrate software to buy for $40. Nuts to that.

Her old drive is dual boot, XP & ME using Boot Magic. When I did the copy, image, I did not copy the Boot Magic or ME partition as she does not use ME anymore. Wondering if that is part of the problem or if I can't use Drive Image to create a new "C ".

As always, any and all help would be appreciated.

Take care,

Martin

 

When you imaged the drive and left ME behind, you left the bootloader files for XP behind also. In a dual boot installation, these files are always located on the root of the primary drive ( C: ).

Probably any easy way to fix it now, without going back and starting from scratch, would be to use an XP boot floppy to boot the system to Windows and then copy the necessary files from the floppy to the root of the new drive. That assumes you have a floppy drive. Boot Floppy Creator Download that file and run it to create the boot floppy. Boot with that floppy in the drive bay. It will give you the choice of booting either the 1st or 2nd partition of the primary drive. Select the 1st and it should work for your situation.

If you have no floppy drive on the box, post back and I'll hook you up with an image file that can create a boot CD.

If you have neither a floppy drive or a CD burner, you can use the XP install CD to boot to the Recovery Console and copy the necessary files from the CD to the root of your C: drive. Type the following two commands pressing enter after each:

copy d:\i386\ntldr C:\
copy d:\i386\ntdetect.com C:\

Substitute your CD-ROM drive letter if different than mine, which is the d: designation above.

HTH

 

Thanks Dude, I'll try that tomorrow, we have floppy in her machine.

Take care,

Martin

 

OK, Martin, post back if you have any problems.

All the best.