How to migrate my C-Drive (Active/Windows) from an old HDD to a new HDD

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Shaitan00

Weaksauce
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Dec 3, 2006
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Here is the situation - currently I have a C-Drive (PATA, Primary Master) that is 10GB (with Windows XP SP2) and this isn't enough to run my system correctly (I have been using it at 300megs free for months, just running a scan disk causes a "windows low-disk space" issue on my c-drive).

My computer specs:
- Asus P4C800-E Deluxe Motherboard (2xSATA, 1xATA 133, 2xATA 100/66/33)
- 5 HDDs in order, all are PATA (10GB, 20GB, 160GB, 60GB, 260GB)
(so these occupy 5/6 of my available PATA slots)
- 1 DVD-burner SATA (on SATA1)

So - I went out and bought a SATA-II 250GB hard disk that I want to use to replace my C-Drive (10GB) and D-Drive (20GB) [primary master & slave] as I think they are too small to keep in my system at this point...
Now this is where things get complicated ... ideally I would like to do the following:

- Backup (ghost? direct copy/paste? etc...) my C-Drive and D-Drive onto DVDs or another one of my HDDs
- Remove the physical C-Drive (10GB) and D-Drive (20GB) from my system
- Install the 250GB SATA-II drive (I'll move my DVD to SATA2 and use SATA1 for this drive)
- Break/partition my new 250GB drive into 2 parts (that will become my new C-Drive and D-Drive)
- Restore my C-Drive (THIS HAS WINDOWS XP SP2 ON IT !!!) and D-Drive onto these new partitions
Main idea is - not to need to format/re-install windows at all - would be a huge hassle that I don't want to deal with :)


Questions:
- How can I accomplish this? The part that I am stuck at the most is the partitioning and restoring of my C-Drive (Windows), when I boot how will I partition the new drive, make one ACTIVE and somehow LOAD the ghosted C-drive backup (can I put it on multiple DVDs and make them bootable or something?)
- What would be the best way to "backup" these drives? Ghosting? Can this work with such LARGE drives as it would take multiple DVDs?
- Would it be a bad idea to leave the other 3 PATA drives where they are or do I have to change them PATA slots (from Secondary to Primary or just leave them on Secondary and have Primary empty)
Is any of this even do-able or am I just dreaming?

Any help, hints, or ideas would be greatly appreciated...
Thanks,
 
I just used Acronis MigrateEasy to move windows xp from a larger disk to a smaller raid0 set and it worked great. Nice software. It will take your data from your current system drive and move it to your target drive, auto re-partition it for you, and setup the MBR also! when it's done you can set the new drive as the boot drive and you're good to go. really nice.

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/download/migrateeasy/

hope it helps.
 
revenant: Thanks that is pretty much exactly what I am looking one. One side-question - will I be able to re-label the "new partition" as C:\ (I want it as my C-Drive again).

Meaning - currently I have my old C-Drive, I will add my new SATA drive and it will be J-Drive (I already have up to I: from my other PATAs), I will perform the migration as you suggested but this will make my J:\ drive the new Active/System partition with windows (which I can set to load on boot) - but that also means my J:\ drive is my new System partition and I would like to keep it my WINDOWS on my C-Drive.

Is this asking to much or is it do'able?
Thanks,
 
the new disk with your xp install will be named C after the process is done.. you won't have to do anything. I tell you, I was extremely happy with this program.. especially because my target was smaller than the source.. I knew I had enough space to fit the data on the target, but all the other programs I tried wouldn't even try if the destination was smaller... anways, this program was very thorough- made the partition fit the smaller target, copied the data, modified the mbr and all.. slick!
 
Not to mention.... those 10-20G drives are old and slow as shit.

Bith Maxblast 4 and the Drivemanager software from Seagate make this a snap. Will take about 5 min max to accomplish C: to new C:, if you want logical C and D seperate, then partition the sataII drive 80G C and the rest D.

Dump the 10, 20, and 60G drives as too slow, the 160/260 are liekly udma5 drives. Then as an added trick format the new primary IDE drive to have a 2.4G partition as the FIRST partition on the drive, and use THIS partition for the systems pagefile.

Most modern motherboards allow simultaneous parallel access to/from the Sata and IDE buses, so you can gain some overhead reduction during paging by having it on a seperate drive.

But switching C to the sataII drive will give you a nice speed increase over that 10G old PoS.

So if any of the drives in your system are Maxtor, use Maxblast4 otherwise use Seagate's utility if one of them is a Seagate. Its free and it does this function extremely well.

Works on raid arrays too, Only drawback Ive found is the lack of ability to dictate the clustersize when setting up. it will default to 4K windows standard.
 
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