Copying XP Over to another Hard Drive?

OzZie · 1 Jan 2007 at 13:23

My dads work friend asked me if this was possible as he is getting a new external hard drive and wants to copy all of his stuff (inc all registry stuff) over to the new hard drive.

Obvious documents etc can all be moved, but he doesn't want to format and install a new copy of XP, so he asked if this was possible.

I'm thinking of maybe some software that can make and image that can be loaded onto this new drive?

Many thanks.

Memphis · 1 Jan 2007 at 13:25

Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost. Most, including myself, prefer Acronis but Norton works perfectly well in most cases.

I assume he isn't wanting to run his PC from the external drive? Just use it as a backup area for the image?

gumbald · 1 Jan 2007 at 13:50

As he said, but after difficulties with Norton, I'm in the Acronis camp.

OzZie · 1 Jan 2007 at 14:27

I'm not 100% sure of this, but i think he wants to run XP from the new external drive, but ill have to get back to you on that one.

Memphis · 1 Jan 2007 at 14:34

OzZie said:
I'm not 100% sure of this, but i think he wants to run XP from the new external drive, but ill have to get back to you on that one.

Well that's a bit more difficult.

Craig321 · 1 Jan 2007 at 14:41

Surely just mirror it with Acronis & set the external as the 1st boot drive from the BIOS?

stuppy · 1 Jan 2007 at 14:50

You cannot boot Windows from external drives. Windows initialises FW/USB drives as its loading, which means it will interupt the loading prcoess.

Look into E-SATA. I dunno whether that would suffer the same problems. ITs basically an external SATA port. You would need to have an ESATA port and an ESATA External Hard Drive though. But like I've said, i dunno whether it would work.