Preserved Topic: Swapping Primary Drive in XP

I took the opportunity to upgrade my system by a few notches today. I bought a GeForce 4 MX440 64Mb DDR TV Video Card, to replace my GeForce 2 MX and an 80Gb MaxtorUltra-ATA/133-7200rpm HardDrive, to add to my slower 40gig harddrive.
I'm thinking that it would make more sense to have my OS (which is XPHome) on the faster 80 gig HardDrive, than leaving it on the slower 40 gig (which is just over half full).
I've formatted the whole 80gig and installed XP on it. Then I've run the "File transfer wizard" and saved my "system settings and files" and tried to transfer them to the new HD (with the fresh install).
The reason I have done this is that it is such a pain doing a fresh install of XP and then spending the next month downloading all the ServicePacks and critical updates. Then tweaking it all back to the way you like it setup.
After finishing the FT Wizard I went into the CMOS and changed the HD settings to boot with the new HD.
The first shock is that I thought all my programs would be there, PS, IE6, etc, but they are not,. I can't tell if the file transfer has been successful or not , I suspect not.
Is there some way I can transfer My XP just as it is now fully up to date with all the installed programs from the original HD to the new HD?
Or should I Just face it and do a complete reinstall of XP then go online and spend the time downloading all the updates (yadayada) And then reinstall all my programs from scratch?
Any Advice or thoughts/experience on the matter would be greatly received.

:::tao:::

well... I'm not sure you can. You could try copying the whole disk from the old drive to the new one, and actually, that should work.
But you won't be able to do it from the old xp, you can't overwrite the new xp... and linux still won't touch ntfs partitions.

There probably is a free way, but it's not gonna be easy, and afterall, if configured right, it loads all necessary updates by itself. (or wait a couple o' months... service pack 2 seems to be around the corner).

so long,
Tyberius Prime

Edit: Inserted the word 'free' into the above sentence. More sound this way around. Thanks brucew

[This message has been edited by Tyberius Prime (edited 01-24-2004).]

It's actually quite easy with the proper tool.

Use something like DriveCopy from PowerQuest. For the extra $20 though, I'd recommend DriveImage which will do the same thing plus it's an excellent way to do backups. Keep your stuff on the 80, put your backup images on the 40. I've been doing that sort of thing for years.

Another thing you can do with imaging software is safely experiment. Image the drive, install, tinker, whatever and if it doesn't work out, restore the image.

I guess you could do what drivecopy does with a linux boot floppy and dd.. at least, if drivecopy works about as I envision it would.

Anyhow, DriveCopy does not work under Windows XP!.
It may be able to clone a xp installation, but it won't run under XP.

I didn't know about DriveCopy but I can assure you that DriveImage is just wonderful. As brucew has already mentioned, I also like to experiment a lot, and DriveImage has saved me a lot of trouble, many times, by allowing me to really restore a partition to its previous state (much better than Windows Restore, that may or may not work). And it works perfectly in Windows XP.
DriveImage and PartitionMagic are two of my favorite tools.



[This message has been edited by viol (edited 01-24-2004).]

Yeah made it back. The Soloution?
It was taking longer for me to "do it the quick way" so I decide on a complete fresh install on the new HDD and spend the rest of my time getting all the XP updates and SP's packs.
I've still got to install all the programmes and get the settings right, but it feels good to have done it from scratch now I'Partitioned the new drive into 3. 2 x 30gig and 1x 12gig (approx).
Thanks for the advice and help


:::tao:::