Moving Windows onto new hard drive

My hard drive is failing and I just bought a new one. The problem is, I don't have my Windows XP setup discs anymore, but I am running a licensed copy of XP on the failing hard drive I want to replace. Is there anyway I can somehow move my XP from my old drive to my new one without having to buy a new OS? My new drive is OEM and doesn't come with any software to assist me, from what I can tell. My old hard drive is unbearable to use and I really want XP -- I have absolutely no desire to upgrade to Vista or wait for Windows 7. Thank you!

 

You can use XXCLONE to clone the old drive to the new one. It's free and works very well for that task as well as other things. I have used it many times and recommend it highly.

 

Is this right?

OK, I am using Acronis True Image to transfer my failing HDD's contents onto a larger external drive as a bootable clone. Now I'm wondering if I need to be able to boot my computer through my external drive in order to do this. (I don't think my BIOS supports such an option.) Or, will the program have some sort of way to let it copy onto my new HDD? They are both SATA, so as I understand it, I don't have the option to make it a slave, correct?

This is taking forever to copy. There were some errors copying some of the sectors over on my C: drive (bad clusters, I assume) but I hope it doesn't cause any problems with this. I erased my backed up stuff on my external drive to make this clone instead, so I hope to god it works and my HDD doesn't finally kick the bucket tonight.

 

I agree with Steve.

Use Acronis to store an image file on the external drive, not a clone copy. That way you can later boot to an Acronis boot disk and deploy the stored image to the new hard drive. Do be certain to run the image verification feature of Acronis to ensure that the image will be usable.

 

So, I guess this sound like what I'm doing is useless. Unfortunately I cannot make my new HDD a slave and it doesn't have a USB port so I can move stuff on it. I don't really understand the idea of the Acronis boot disk. I wanted to somehow clone only Windows and try to put it on a CD or DVD, but I didn't see anyway Acronis was going to let me do that. :/

 

Acronis can indeed do what you want but you'll have to read the Help files. They spell it out very clearly how to make a boot media that you can use to run the Acronis program on a computer that has no bootable drive. It will recognize your present external drive and (assuming you placed an Acronis image on it) deploy an image it contains to any connected drive that is large enough to hold it. It will allow you to render the newly deployed image bootable and will initialize the drive and mark it as active. That's all you need.

You'll have to do the reading since you have the program. If you have questions after reading the help files, post back for help.

Then create the boot media that Acronis allows. Test it to make sure it works.

Basically what you will be doing is using Acronis to create an image of your entire existing System Drive and sending that image to your present external drive. Then disconnect the old System Drive and install the new HD as per the manufacturers instructions and using the boot media supplied with it.

Then you will boot the computer with an Acronis boot media in the drive so that the Acronis program will run. That will present you with all the options you need to deploy the old System drive image to your new drive.