Replacing hard drive under XP

Just ordered a Wd 120 GB w/8mb cache on it. I am replacing my old 40 GB. Can I copy that drive to the new one? Or do I have to Reinstall?.

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Just ordered a Wd 120 GB w/8mb cache on it. I am replacing my old 40 GB. Can I copy that drive to the new one? Or do I have to Reinstall?

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3087 Posts
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I've never had any luck copying a drive to a new one and Win2k be happy. Haven't tried it under XP, but I assume you'd run into the same issue.

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It may work if you use something like Ghost. Not 100% sure tho under 2K/XP. It works on Win9x

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You can't do it under Windows, some files are in use and will not copy if we are talking about the system partition. On any other partition it should work well.
 
With Drive Image I've done this many times, no problem at all, and I assume Ghost would work just as well even if we're talking about the system partition. Just watch out, the 5.0 of Drive Image hides either partition.
 
It could be that there are some free/shareware utilities for this also, I vaguely recall seeing some.
 
H.

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It may be somewhat complicated, but I got it to work on a Win2K system. You install your new drive as a slave to the old drive. Then, you Ghost the old drive using your new drive as a target. Then, make your new drive the master and either remove your old hard drive or make it the slave.

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If you have two devices on the same IDE channel (=cable), the slower one will determine the speed. Thus, you should not put HD:s of different generation (like a ata33 and ata66) on the same channel.
 
At least with Drive Image, it doesn't matter for the cloning process how you have your drives setup. And its really a few mouse clicks to do the whole thing.
 
H.

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OP
Tried it , but symantec says copying XP deosnt work right, cause of encrypption, and the windows activation