How to
migrate OS and files from lower capacity to higher capacity HD ?
Bluetooth 15 Dec 2002
Two days ago, I bought a new Western Digital 80G 8M Cache HD. The first thing
that comes to my mind is definitely to transfer my current 20G contents and
WinXP over to the new HD. The first thought was to use Norton Ghost. The version
I have is version 7.0 so it works well with FAT32 since my Partitions are all in
FAT32. (This version would not support NTFS 5).
First of all, I FDISK the new HD into 20G partitions x 4. Next I use Norton
Ghost and I started to do a disk partition copy from the 20G HD to the 80G HD.
After spending about 30 minutes, I installed the new HD and removed the old HD
by disconnecting the power and IDE cable. I rebooted the system and now it's
running on the new 80G HD.
The new HD booted up and went straight into the logon prompt. It's extremely
fast. After keying in the user name and password. It hung there and the HD
doesn't seem to be trashing out information. I was wondering what went wrong.
After a while, a dialog box pops up saying that Windows is not able to access
activation information. I wonder what is that.
Hmm, I installed back the old 20G HD and boot up from the 80G HD and guess what,
I am able to login and went straight into the desktop. I was confused. I removed
the 20G HD and booted only with the 80G HD, and the same problem.
I shutdown, removed the 20G HD, and used the WinXP CD to repair the 80G WinXP
installation. After that, I rebooted and went into Windows. I ran MMC and
checked out the available partitions. The 80G first partition is drive G: This
is weird why the partition is reassigned as G drive. The rest are drives D, E,
F. Could this be the reason why the activation information can't be found since
it's referencing drive C instead of drive G ? Even if you use MMC (computer
management) , there is no way you can reassign the drive letter of a system
partition.
I searched the web using google and found that some users also have the same
problem. I found no solution.
Today, I tried another method, I used DOS to repartition and format the 80G HD
into 4 partitions of roughly 20G each. I use Ghost and duplicate Disk instead of
duplicate partitions. It took me 35 mins to duplicate the whole 20G HD with 4
partitions onto the 80G HD. I removed the 20G and am able to boot directly into
Windows after entering the login information. (I am using this HD right now).
Now the drive letters are C: E: F: G:
Strange where on earth happened to drive D ? Luckily I can reassign non system
partition drive letters using MMC (computer management). After reassignment, i
rebooted and now all the drives are intact, all programs works just like
before!.
