Transferring XP to new drive

[SoND]

New hard drive is on its way and I need to transfer XP without ruining the registry and all of my installed programs however it's not a straightforward clone onto the new drive.

I want to move XP onto the drive most of the programs are currently installed on and I want to move those programs onto a partition on the new drive.

Has anyone ever done something like this before?

Currently I have

[C:, P:] 80gb + 5gb Pagefile partition

[E:] 250gb Programs

[W:, X:] 1TB Partitioned

- I want C: and P: to go onto E: and turn into C:.
- E: to go onto a new 500gb partition + other partitions (and possibly the pagefile) on new drive.

I think some spoofing of serial or ID numbers is required to keep everything inline but I've lost myself from here.

Any help is appreciated.
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Go back to bed - You have no rights - "Streetfighters ~ Mainstream motorcycling's crackwhore sister."

[el_oso]

you can use symbolic links. not sure if you can do that in XP though.
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[tahrey]

How about:

New 2Tb disk to replace the lot, about £60 these days.

Make a 120Gb C:\ and 375Gb E:\ (+50% each) and the rest of it is W:\ (and X:\ if you like)

Use something like XXClone to copy everything across as-was, except you have the pagefile on C: (if you have it as a fixed size, there is NO reason to have it on a seperate drive - you can have it defragged then left alone, even moved to the start of the partition if you like, and quite easily excluded from backups, even imagefile ones).

C:\ now takes up less than 10% of the 3.5" platter rather than over 90% (far quicker access times), ditto E:\ takes up under 20% vs 100%

Or a variation on this if you already have the replacement disc (as your post suggests) and it's a different size.

I'm trying to figure this one out... why first of all you have such wild drive letters (rather than C, D, E, F, G)... and why you want to merge your programs and system drives. If they're seperate right now, you may as well keep them as such, even going onto the same physical disk there's not much bother with making extra partitions. You'll lose the potential performance gains of having them on physically seperate disks, but gain some when they're being used in a non-clashing manner, and data on the two partitions will still be stored closer together, on average, than it would have been even within itself on the seperate discs. It's really not worth the bleedin' hassle trying to merge them all, unless you want to get with learning how to do Symlinks (which windows generally isn't that happy about) or getting hold of some utility that can scan through all your shortcuts and the registry and transfer it all over. I'd be surprised to find something of that complexity for free, but you may be lucky.

(A possible alternative - copy them all into a certain folder on C:\, then have that folder hosted as a fake E:\ by a bit of NTFS trickery ... mind that I can't remember whether it actually works THAT way, or by making a fake folder out of a drive instead)

When I upgraded my laptop from 40 to 120gb I found it worked perfectly well to have a 40 + 80gb partition setup on the new drive. XXCloned everything onto the smaller partition (which now had about 1/3rd the average seek times), then shift all the Documents and other bulky non-system/non-program files onto D:\ ... now still have about 8gb free on C:\ even after a couple years further bloat and it still runs fairly nicely.

[SoND]

Various old drives occupied a lot of the letters originally, haven't decided what to label the new one as.

I am intending on keeping Windows on its own physical disk, currently known as E:, but first I need to move the programs on it onto the new disk. A nice new 2Tb I got for about £60 btw

Will simply renaming the new partition, to E:, be enough to 'impersonate' the original disk and not have the programs thinking they have been moved?
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Go back to bed - You have no rights - "Streetfighters ~ Mainstream motorcycling's crackwhore sister."

[MarkJ]

If you really must keep the registry disk clone is probably the best way to go as people have said.

I always ask this though, do you need to keep things installed? I always just install new programs after a format as it's a bit cleaner. Also, quite a few programs don't need to be installed to the registry to work anyway.

[tahrey]

If you've ever experienced the enormous pain in the dick that is trying to get hold of the installers for all those massively helpful freeware utilities you use that can't be just copied over from the old Program Files folder, or trying to convince your expensive, paid-for commercial program to reinstall when you've lost the product key or their authentication server was thrown in a skip two years ago, then the answer is a resounding YES.

I have to go through such a process every now and then at work when my workstation is re-imaged (as part of the IT team I've managed to dodge it as long as possible, but now the antivirus doesn't update properly any more so I'm steeling myself for a few days of pain, ETA: soon), and I'm dreading having to get a new laptop at some point in the next 6-12-18 months (18 if I can help it, 6 if that horrible rattling noise becomes terminal...) because that will mean starting from fresh, with a pretty much mandatory upgrade to Win 7. It's a perfectly nice OS, I'm assured, but I can see an AWFUL lot of the progs I use to get done the things I do simply no longer working under it. Or being old enough that they will no longer activate online when I reinstall, despite otherwise having nothing wrong with them.
(Particularly: Cool Edit 96. It does everything I need it to. Its successors got a lot more expensive and actually lost some features I use. It's not 100% happy under XP even in 95-emulation mode. I can see it and 7 having mutual allergic reactions. Apparently XP emulation mode isn't brilliant either)

The only thing I can think of is, when upgrading, to uninstall all the hardware-specific drivers from the old machine, turn its C: drive into a Virtualbox disc image, thereby running my old stuff in that as a virtual machine on the new physical one - hoping the massive change in perceived hardware doesn't have it crying off to the MS activation servers.

Oh aye, and there's the small matter of drivers, too. Between time-before-last this machine was reimaged, and the immediately previous time, I somehow lost my bluetooth dongle installer CD, and the image of it (which was on a HDD that went foom). Dongle's manufacturer is VERY cagey about giving out copies of their software for some reason, even though it should only work with their shit. Ergo, I have no working dongle. Because of a clean install.

XP doesn't actually need reinstalling and I suspect that's the same for the newer MS OSes, so long as you don't massively abuse them (...like my cousins, who I had to reinstall Vista for on both their laptops). I've been rocking the same one for nearly 5 years. The Win98 reinstallation in order to clear out persistent driver bugs or other random cockups that nothing else could fix was almost an annual ritual. I think I cracked open a celebratory beer one time I realised I'd made it to 18 months. Nowadays, not so much. You can just copy it over and keep going. There may be some cruft in there but it doesn't affect the system to any reasonable degree (so it may boot up a minute slower the one or two times a month ... year? you actually cold boot rather than wake it from sleep or hibernation, so what), and hard disc space is insanely cheap. It's simply not worth the aggro and heartache.

BTW SoND - addendum to that PM - I can understand where the confusion over the partitioning comes from, probably... it'd be from seeing that Unix and Linux guys have a seperate swap partition (it's a required part of the system setup that hangs over wayback from the blinkenlight-refridgerator days) and also that their systems tend to run more efficiently and reliably. Correlation does not, however, imply causation. It's just a different way of laying out the disc map, one that probably had /swp (or /tmp) and /var on a different physical disc to /sys, /usr, etc... in a machine that likely had quite a bit more chip RAM and a beefier CPU (and, at the time, more efficient OS) than your cheapie, everyday Windows box, in an era where swapping was a pretty critical manner. I haven't had notable swap issues since I first upgraded the current machine from 1/2 to 1Gb, because it hardly touches it - and even before it was more of an occasional annoyance when I opened too many browser tabs at once than something that ruined my day. Going up to 2Gb was just so I could hold my head up and say I'd maxed it before finally giving in and getting a new one