move to larger hard drive

I can't find exactly the specific question here, altho must've been answered, sooooo... in the olden days of 98 or ME, one wanting to replace a hard drive with a larger one would fdisk, format, and connect the larger as slave to the old, start windows and from the run command line, type
xcopy c:\*.* d: /c/h/e/k/r , which copied the complete and total hard drive to the new, unplug and take out the old, plug the new larger in as master, and away you'd go without even a slight speck of any hitch at all ever. Now, xp doesn't do that, altho the command runs and goes along as if it was, then when you go to boot the new hard drive, it doesn't. Would that have anything at all to do with antivirus or security or administrative rights or anything at all like that that settings could be changed and run that string xcopy? I can't imagine that as operating systems progress, we would have to resort to a third party, ghost or whatever, but has anyone found a flawless gem of a way to upgrade like that xcopy command of old?

 

You can go ahead and imagine it because it's true. With XP on a NTFS file storage system, there is no simple command line tool that will make a bootable copy (clone) to another drive. It requires the help of a 3rd party utility.

Often that is supplied with the new drive. It amounts to a utility that can perform a bit-by-bit copy of the drive data to the new drive.

If you only bought a "Bare Drive" you'll have to buy, beg, borrow, or steal some 3rd party utility to do that copy for you. I have used Ghost and True Image - both do the job well. Be aware that you must always copy to a drive of equal or greater size.

That being said, I'll admit that if you're well versed in these one-eyed monsters, you could possibly use some freeware such as Ranish Partition manager or other limited free cloning tools you can find by a Google search. I must warn you that they have limitations and require special skills that most of us mortals don't possess. Generally if you were of that caliber, you wouldn't have asked in the first place.

The reasons for this problem is mainly because XP will not easily allow critical files to be copies while it's booted. Even if you convert the XP file storage system to FAT32, you'll not succeed in cloning it from the command line since you'll lose the integrity of all the Long File Name files. It's just a big can of worms. You'll have to throw down some coins for the 3rd party tool to do it easily.

 

Hello 22lin,

I've just cloned one of my drives with an OS on it using Apricorn:
http://www.apricorn.com/shopping.php?ID=25
http://www.apricorn.com/product_details.php?ID=381

FYI: used an external HD cage via USB to house the new HD, then switched the old and new, using the old HD as extra storage.

The software is drive imaging, highly recommend as a backup - wouldn't live without now, plus cloning.

Regards - Charles