how to clone current hard drive to new hard drive?

[cold]

I recently bought a new and much better hard drive and was wondering how to clone the one that is currently in my computer. It took me along time to set it up the way I want it and I would like to copy it to the new hard drive and use the new one as my primary. what utilities should I use and what steps should I follow in order to do this correctly? Also my old hard drive came with a windows xp recovery partition on it and I would like not to transfer it just the partition with the os and my current apps and info installed?

thanks for any help.

 

[khha4113]

Do you have a bootable XP CD (just in case you have to repair OS since you change the HD and probably the activation code kicks in and not allow you to load the new XP)?
PowerQuest Drive Image and Norton Ghost are cloning programs.

Good or Bad have no meaning at all, depends on what your point of view is.

 

[cold]

no, I dont have a bootable xp cd. Is there anyway to get by the activation code?

 

[Crashman]

I swear most of the members of this forum are rockheads. You can copy your old drive to your new drive with MaxBlast Plus. It's 99% reliable and 100% free for download from Maxtor's site.

<font color=blue>Watts mean squat if you don't have quality!</font color=blue>

 

[khha4113]

You can copy your old drive to your new drive with MaxBlast Plus.

I don't think that's the problem. Read his post again!

Good or Bad have no meaning at all, depends on what your point of view is.

 

[khha4113]

I dont have a bootable xp cd.

You can create XP floppy bootdisks (total of 6 diskettes, I believe) downloadable from <b><A HREF="http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;310994" target="_new"><font color=blue>Microsoft Support</A></b></font color=blue> site.

Is there anyway to get by the activation code?

You can call Microsoft and explain the situation.

Good or Bad have no meaning at all, depends on what your point of view is.

 

[Crashman]

Also my old hard drive came with a windows xp recovery partition on it and I would like not to transfer it just the partition with the os and my current apps and info installed?

It certainly sounds like he wants to transfer the active partition from one drive to another! In fact, he specifically wants to transfer ONLY that partition and not the restore partition.

MaxBlast Plus does partition to partition copies. If you don't have a partition on the new drive, it will make a new partition, that contains everything from the old partition, in the unpartitioned space.

<font color=blue>Watts mean squat if you don't have quality!</font color=blue>

 

[khha4113]

It certainly sounds like he wants to transfer the active partition from one drive to another!

The problem is would it be able to load into XP as I experienced when changing from IBM to WD harddisk. It simply hanged at Welcome screen. I had to repair it using XP CD. It has something to do with activation code if XP detects hardware changes.

Good or Bad have no meaning at all, depends on what your point of view is.

 

[Crashman]

I've never experienced that problem. I've seen that problem when a large amount of hardware was changed, but not from just one drive.

<font color=blue>Watts mean squat if you don't have quality!</font color=blue>