How to transfer OS from old HD to new?

I am sorry if this has been beaten to death but hear goes.

I am about to replace my original 40 gig Maxtor drive with a Seagate
(Barracuda 7200.7 120 GB ATA 100 7200rpm 8MB). Got good deal at www.ncix.com
$123CDN.

I have a P4T-E, with an Intel 2.0a Northwood.

Running WinXP Pro with latest updates, 512 Samsung RDRAM, Radeon 9600Pro

Can I transfer my OS to the new drive without having to do a fresh install?
Do I set it up thus: old drive Primary Master, new drive: Secondary Master?
Does WinXP have a utility that will allow me to do this or 3rd party
software? Is there a site I can go to with specific instructions?

Thanks for any assistance you can provide.

Ron

 

Yup, just use Ghost to copy from HD to HD.
There are some other free utilities that will do this too.
I think Maxtor's own free "Maxblast" utility will do this for you.

http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/maxblast3.htm

 

Only if the disks are identical.

 

My one contribution would be to encourage you to swap the drives physically.
By that I mean, if I get your intention, turn the old drive into the slave
on the primary channel and add the new one as the master. You can just
change the jumpers to accomplish this, and if relocating the drives
themselves is too much hassle, just twist up the IDE cable to accomplish
this. Of course, you need to take the far end of the IDE cable and plug
that into the master and the near end into the slave. Some will say this is
a bad idea but I've always gotten away with it even though I try to avoid it
if I can.

This is not to say that you won't "get away with it" if you just make the
new drive the slave and instruct the bios to boot from the slave. But,
there is just no advantage in doing so and it might create problems with the
boot record/boot.ini so why do it?

I have used Norton Ghost images in this way (with Win2K) quite a few times
and never had a problem. I have read elsewhere that with XP you need to
image the whole drive and not just a specific partition. I don't know if
this is true because I've yet to use Ghost on XP. I think that DriveImage
or other imaging tools are likely to work also, so you are not limited to
Ghost.

Good luck!

ken
p.s. if you have a friend who owns an imaging program you could just
"borrow" an image program boot disk for a half hour and do this imaging
business; you don't need to actually load such a program on your hard drive.

 

Try ACRONIS MigrateEasy Deluxe. I've used it for all my NTFS formatted
harddrives. If your using FAT32 with WINXP Pro (probably not) your can do it
the old fashion way (manually using a WIN98 2nd edition boot disk) and then
XCOPY all the files.

Good luck,

Pete

 

I believe you can use ghost, so long as the target blank
drive/partitions are the same or larger in size.

Many HD manufacturers have a "new drive setup/transfer" program that
will transfer all the files from your old drive to the new drive.

--
Best regards,
Kyle
| | > Yup, just use Ghost to copy from HD to HD.
| > There are some other free utilities that will do this too.
| > I think Maxtor's own free "Maxblast" utility will do this for you.
|
| Only if the disks are identical.
|
|

 

Uh? No.
You can use Ghost to copy any size/make of disk to any other size/make disk.
I've done it MANY times.

This also doesnt apply to Maxblast. Maxblast's only requirement is that ONE
of the discs is a maxtor.

 

Go to the Seagate website - they have a great program (Disktools?) which
will do it for you. The program will copy over your old drive, and at the
correct point display an animation showing how to change the drive from
master to slave, and vice versa when the copy is done. Its a free download
BTW.

 

Thanks. I saw something on their site called Diskwizard but not Disktools.
Is this what you mean?

Ron