Here it is, after 2 months of Hell, the actual procedure used to miagrate Windows XP Home edition from a 20gb hard drive to a 100 gb hard drive. No thanks whatsoever, to microsoft whose every suggestion proved ludicrous.
I had 6 partitions ( c,d,e,f,g,h) on the smaller drive, with C being the "system" partition and E being the "boot" partition. (These are Microsoft's names for these partitions, not mine!) The C partition was quite small and was formatted in FAT16 to accommodate several old DOS based applications resident on it. All the remaining partitions were FAT32 and WINDOWS was resident on the E partition. All I wanted to do was move up from the 20gb hard drive to a 100gb hard drive. That is a procedure, albeit not with WINDOWS XP HE, that I have done at least 50 times before with never a problem. The usual method was to simply plug the new drive onto the IDE cable as a Slave; partition and format it; then simply copy the files from the old to the new drive with partition magic or drivecopy or some other utility. Finally, remove the old drive, change the new one to MASTER, boot from a floppy and make the new drive "active" and reboot. It has always worked flawlessly until now.
After two months of total
frustration and countless calls/emails to Microsoft, and at least
100 or more tries, I finally said, "to hell with it, I'm
going to do this MY WAY and if it don't work, I'll just forget
it." What would happen is everything would seem to go well
and all the files would get to the new drive, the reregistration
of windows would occur and then I'd find that the new drive was
either setup incorrectly or simply wouldn't boot. It would go
to the blue "welcome" screen and would simply hang at
that point. Following MS's suggestions proved either fruitless
or at times impossible. For example, they "suggest"
that you can do it with their NTBACKUP program which is contained
on the installation CD, but is not installed. The program must
be installed in a working WINDOWS HD before it can be used. That
isn't a problem, with the "OLD" drive; however, how
the hell do you install it in a working copy of windows on the
new drive when windows isn't installed yet??????? That program
is a stripped copy of My PC Backup, a commercial product. The
proper way for the product to work is that it makes a 4 diskette
disaster recovery set along with the backup of your system. Unfortunately,
that disaster recovery preparation does NOT function in windows
XP and that is clearly stated in Microsofts OWN FAQ on the subject.
Without that recovery set, you cannot restore the backup to the
new drive and therefore, cannot move windows to the new drive.
Wake up Microsoft! Of course the MS "techs" were really
helpful: "You sure you have the computer plugged in?"
"Are the drives formatted" "Do you have the drive
power connection properly connected" At no time did any of
them ever address the fact that the disaster recovery set could
not be made and they totally disregarded the fact that I told
them at least a dozen times of that problem. It had to be something
I was doing wrong, according to them.
Being an Electronics Engineer and a hacker, along with being a programmer and having spent many years as a systems analyst, I said to myself, "Self, what the hell is going on here. This is just a program and there HAS to be a way to do this. Even Microsoft wouldn't put out a program for public use that can't be moved by a legitimate owner to his own upgraded hard drive." So, I came up with and tried the following procedure and it WORKED perfectly. You're welcome to copy this document and use it yourself if you wish. Good luck!
Before you begin, you MUST have Backup My PC, Partition Magic 7 and Drive Image 2002. Later versions, of course, will work fine. You also need to make a set of RESCUE disks from BOTH of these. Then and ONLY then are you ready to begin.
1. Partition the new drive exactly
the same as the old, except for the sizes of the partitions. In
other words, if partition1 is FAT16 on the old drive, then it
must be the same on the new one. Don't worry about cluster waste,
that can be fixed later. Use Partition Magic for this. It will
make your original hard drive "invisible" so as not
to disrupt the drive identification process.
2. Boot the computer using the "rescue" disks made with
Drive Image Pro, with both hard drives in the system. Move the
data from drive C to the 1st partition on the new drive. Move
the image from drive E to the 3rd partition on the new drive.
3. Boot the computer using the "rescue" disks made with
Partition Magic and expand the new E partition so it fills all
the "unused" space between partition 3 and partition
4 on the new drive, which was left after moving the data with
Drive Image Pro. DO NOT TAMPER WITH PARTITION 1.
4. Make a backup of partition C and partition E of the old drive,
using Backup My PC, version 4.81. Be sure to also backup the system
files! After verifying that the backup is valid, disconnect the
OLD drive from the bus. Setup the new drive as the only drive
in the system.
5. Reset the BIOS so the computer will boot from a CD ROM.
6. Place the Windows XP Home Edition upgrade CD in the drive and
boot the
computer. At the menu, select "fix" as the option. SETUP
will now install a complete new Windows XP over the old version
on your hard drive. It will ask you for registration information.
Go ahead and register if you can; otherwise, just go on into windows.
7. Once the computer has booted into windows on the new drive,
install Backup MP PC on the NEW hard disk.
8. Boot from the Partition Magic floppy disks and make the C and
E partitions on the new hard drive, invisible.
9. Reinstall the old hard drive on the bus as the primary drive
and set the new drive as the slave.
10. Boot the computer from the Drive Image floppies and copy drives
D, F, G and H over to the new hard disk.
11. Boot from the Partition Magic disks and expand the D, F, G
and H partitions to whatever size you want them to finally be.
12. Remove the Old hard drive and make the New drive the only
HD in the system. Boot from the Partition Magic disks and unhide
drives C and E. Make drive C the active drive.
13. Boot to the new hard drive. BEFORE IT FULLY BOOTS, press F8
and select the "write new tables and log files". The
system will create all new bootlog files and will then boot in
the "safe" mode.
14. Start Backup My PC on the new drive and restore the backups
you made of Drive C and drive E. Also restore the SYSTEM status
files.
15. Reset the BIOS and reboot the system to the new hard drive.
It will again ask you for activation. Go ahead and activate it.
If you have gotten this far, you have the problem licked. The
computer will then continue booting, which may take several minutes
while it scans and inventories equipment and software. When it
finishes, your windows desktop should look exactly like the one
you had on the old system, and all your old software will be in
the same relative place and should work. There MAY be a
problem with your BROADBAND INTERNET, your VIDEO card, your PRINTER
and your
SOUND CARD. If so, just reinstall these items from their original
installation disks and you should be "in like Flynn!"
16. Reboot the system and everything should be fine. Test out
all your software and applications and they should all run just
as before, except you'll have much more space. NOW, you can bring
up Partition Magic and expand that C drive to fill the empty space
behind it. You can also convet it to FAT 32. Reboot again. If
it boots, you're done! If not, you need to go visit a priest and
get some communion or a pat on the hamakah or another twist in
your turban, then start the whole damned process over.
Microsoft's suggestions don't work. Their copy of NTBACKUP is
nothing but a subset of Backup MyPC. It won't work because it
cannot use a CDRW or a ZIP drive as the media. If you have 2GB
of data, it would take more than 200 floppy disks to back it up.
That is absurd. Besides, Backup My Pc only costs $40 or so. In
addition, their procedures, as written, cannot be followed. If
you don't believe me, just download their FAQ papers on the subject
and try to follow the chain logically. You can't.