Can I move Windows from one hard drive to another?

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I think the best way to do this is to boot from a linux cd (make sure all the utilities you need are on it) and then use DD to tranfer the drive to one to the other. It should work =)

http://www.rajeevnet.com/hacks_hints/os_clone/os_cloning.html

Here's an issue I've never seen addressed and I don't know if it's possible. I have a computer running NT 4.0. Bought a new Dell with XP Professional. I need to get software from the NT 4.0 machine to the XP Professional machine so that it'll function. Here's the dilemma. I don't have the installation discs that originally came with the software. There is no way to get the installation discs that came with the software. Is there any way to get this program on to the XP Professional Machine without cloning the old drive and doing an upgrade? I sincerely hope so.

Thank you for you help.

There's no single answer - it's going to depend entirely on the programs themselves. Some will work just by copying whatever you find under their directory in "c;\program files" to the same location on the other machine. Many will not work because they really REALLY require that their setup program be run to initialize their settings in the system registry and elsewhere. So if you don't have the setup disks for those you'll be kinda screwed.

Does anybody know how to copy a WinXP NTFS Primary Partition to a WinXP Dynamic Raid 1 partition? Note: all the utility programs I've come across (eg Partition Magic) fail to work with Dynamic Volumes!

I would simply mount both drives and xcopy the contents across myself. Is there something preventing you from doing that?

Hi,

I have done it yesterday with Win XP SP2, so it's possible but it took me ~20 hours to find out why just cloning the partition didn't work correctly. The recipe below did work for my PC and I expect it will work for others too but use it at your own risk :)
If reinstalling the OS from scratch is a valid option for you do that instead of cloning as you get rid of unused files/programs/accounts.

steps taken:
0) Backup all relevant data (user accounts)
1) Add second disk with a partition for windows. 2) Make the disk basic primary and bootable
3) Make the partition active.
4) Format the partition (alloc bad sectors)
- do NOT assign a drive letter
- do NOT label it
5) Clone the windows partition to the new disk
6) Remove both disks
7) Make 2nd disk the master, 1st disk slave
8) Put disks back (I had to switch them as I poked my bios settings too much)
9) Reboot, the new disk is now the windows disk
[optionally you need to patch boot.ini]

So far as tested all applications run well.

Most important 'learning' steps:
Biggest error was assigning of a drive letter to the new partition on the 2nd disk. In one of the first tries I rebooted with only the second disk,
no succes.
Tried to fix it by adding the first disk (patched nboot.ini so I could boot from the second disk)and rebooted again. XP started and I logged on. The process explorer from www.sysinternals.com (great tools) showed me that XP was running from disk F: but part of the processes/services we started from the original C: disk. Explained a lot!

Rebooted with only the new disk and tried to repair the partition with help of the original XP boot CD. This improves things a lot but not enough, the drive was still F: and none of the installed programms had the right path not to mention the registry :)
I understood the problem now, the 2nd disk must be assigned C: so I put in the 1st disk again and booted, formatted again but I was unable to assign it the letter C: as this was in use allready and the system drive letter could not be removed or changed. This left me the only choice to delete the driveletter completely and let the OS assign it automatically at boottime. And then it started to work again (finally).

So far my 2 cents,
rob

I appear to have a similar problem. My PC is running really slow - i have done everything possible (in my capabilities) to remedy this by removing programs i dont use a lot, getting rid of my strange named things (cant remember what they are called :/) in my windows file and turned off system restore. However, I do have 2 hard drives and would want to move everything from my normal c: drive to my d: as that drive has a vast amount of space. Is this something that i can do, like just moving files without the aid of norton ghost 9.0? (my pc doesnt seem to like it). I am kinda hoping that this can be remedied simply as i am not technically minded.

In your shoes I would probably copy all of C: to a subdirectory on D:, and then reformat C: and reinstall Windows on C:.

"Moving" WIndows to the second drive in order to boot from that drive, while preserving everything already on that drive also, will likely not work.

Well, Ive come across, (after manyhours of attempting to derive a way to move my copy of windows XP home to a newer pc, and also on a different hard drive) a way to succede and get the disk to auctually boot. First, Ill address the problem. XP wouldnt boot on the new pc, using the new harddrive, or the old one for that matter. OK now heres what I did, I found a program called Casper XP, great utility to copy a hdd or create partitions and such. I used that on the old pc to copy the old hdd to the new hdd by connecting the new hdd as a slave. After i copied it, I tested it on the old pc, it worked fine. But when i switched it to the new pc, it wouldnt boot. Scratched my head for bout 4 hours and finally thought "well, the pc aint booting most likly cause the motherboard dont recognize or cant find the right drivers" so, I hooked the new hdd back to the old pc, booted it, went to device manager and deleted all of the system componets. Thus the new pc wouldnt try to load them, it would use the default settings and bios of the new machine. I hooked it up and EUREKA ! it worked!

Not too bad for a 16 year old, considering i asked 3 or 4 people that consider themselves pros in the computer field and also searched all over the net to try to find a solution. I hope that this helps someone, Thanks Tony

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