Gaming how to copy C: to new drive?

[BedtimeGuy]

the C: drive in my windows XP computer (the one with the OS actually on it) is only 75-ish gigabytes, and its running out of room. i want to copy it all onto my empty 250GB USB HDD, and i also have a second (full) drive called D: . i'm pretty sure i cant just copy all fo the files onto the new drive, plug it in, and boot windows off of it... so how do i do it? what program (preferably free, but not necessarily) can i use to do this? what sort of BIOS fiddling will i have to do? please help.

 

[cracker]

Self Image is a free tool to clone disks and disk partitions. You would want to clone the whole drive so it copied the MBR.

You really might want to do a new install though (if you have the means to do so) since it sounds like you have a lot of crap on your drive that you will just be dumping onto the new drive...

Most BIOSes on systems nowadays will let you select the boot disk so usually you can change that in the boot section of your BIOS setup. If if is an older motherboard then it may require the boot drive to be the master drive on the primary IDE which you can do by changing the jumpers on both drives (master for the new drive and slave or cable select for the bitch drive).

 

[rdurbin]

First you would have to make sure your bios supports USB booting, most of them do nowadays. You will also need to change your boot priority in BIOS so your usb hard drive is first in the list so your system will boot from it first, or at least stick if before your old hard drive (you probably want CD drive to be first in case you need to boot from it to repair) You will also need to setup your usb hard drive to be bootable, I believe you will have to refromat it so you are gonna lose everything on it. After you have done all this, you should be able to simply just copy everything over.

I know vista and windows 7 does not allow you to install on a usb drive but you can on windows xp, but you may not be able to copy all the files and have it boot. You may have to re-install windows xp on your usb drive and just copy your important data files

 

[Rydian]

Just boot off a linux livecd like Knoppix? That's what I did when copying a harddrive to a larger one.

 

[BedtimeGuy]

@cracker my motherboard is really old, but if all i have to do is make sure it's the master, then that's ok, im completely replacing the old one anyways.

@rdurbin sorry, to clarify, im taking the old USB HDD out of it's enclosure and putting it in the PC.

@rydian i ahve a lot of liveCD s lying around that i could use. is there a program or something i would have to use? preferably for ubuntu or open suse.

 

[Rydian]

If the livecd is anything recent (within 8 months or so), then it should be able to read and write NTFS volumes automatically.

Do you need windows to be bootable off that USB drive, or do you plan on taking the harddrive out of the internal shell?

 

[cracker]

I think the main concern with whatever way you go (livecd, tool with bootable iso, or windows program) is whether it supports cloning the mbr as well. Also some tools will truncate the extra space on the destination drive to the size of the source disk that gets backed up so you may need to use the built-in Windows tool to allocate, format the unused space into a new partition. I don't believe XP can resize/append partitions so you will have to use a differnt tool if that's what you want (but I highly recommend making multiple partitions on the disk for backup purposes in case a format is needed.

Also is there a particular reason why you don't want to install a fresh copy of Windows? It would be a much better method since I assume it has been months or years since your last clean install and nowadays it is hard to find a system without some crapware installed not to mention all the temp files that accumulate from inconsiderate programs and Windows itself...

 

[kicknhorse]

Just out of curiousity, is it not better to have Windows boot on a smaller harddrive anyway and use the larger one for storage?

I mean on a smaller drive, like your 75gb, its always easier to defragment or cleanup.

I always find it easier this way, and in theory it should run better.

Correct me if I am wrong by all means

 

[zhuzhuchina]

i usually use symantec ghost

 

[thel0be]

edited.

 

[BedtimeGuy]

@rydian im taking the HDD out of of the enclosure. you are saying i can just use ubuntu for example and copy the whole hard drive? would that copy the MBR too?

@cracker i dont have my XP install disk... i cant do a fresh instal, so if i screw this up, im out an OS.

@kicknhorse because this is the only way to have more room on my PC while still haing a USB HDD to store wii games on, im switching the TWo HDDs out.

so pretty much, what i have to do is format the destination HDD, then use self image to copy it setting the input s my current C: drive and the output as the new one. or can it not do that because i would have to unmount the HDD first? can i give the new drive whatever drive letter and name i want?

 

[Hakoda]

Forget it my method is way to confusing.