Copying Windows 2000 or XP Drive

Former Member

Any ideas how to flawlessly copy my hard drive with XP on it?

I have two 20gb Hard rives and just reinstalled windows and got it all nice and running smoothly so thought now this would be a good point to copy the hard drive and have a backup on the other identical drive, same make, model, etc.

I used Partition Magic and copied the entire drive and it seems to boot OK, as long as I switch the master slave jumpers correctly BUT every time windows started on the copied drive it keeps saying new hard installed and needs to restart.

This 2nd hard drive would probabaly work OK in an emergency if the first totally failed but don't see why it's so difficult to try and backup a drive that has windows 2000 or XP.

Former Member

You can use drivecopy, but the problem with XP / 2000 is that they remember what partition they were installed onto, so if you swop/add drives it can render the installation unusable.

To be honest you are probably best starting from scratch by installing the new drive as primary IDE master, install windows, then copy everything from the old drive.

Former Member

I've used Norton Ghost 2001 sucessfully to back up drives, and/or partitions before. Win9x, NTFS (Win2k & XP), and Linux formatted drives and partitions.
You could download the 15 day trial version (though I think there's a new version now), and just reset your clock in the BIOS to make the computer think it's within the 15 day trial when you come to restore the partition/drive.

Former Member

Yep Wobble is right I swear by Norton Ghost.

Former Member

Yup i use Norton Ghost, had no problems with it and it fits on a floppy

Former Member

Doesnt Windows XP have a files and settings transfer wizard?