Cloning problem with friend's drive

[rjisinspired]

Greetings.

I'm hoping this is the correct spot for posting my problem.. Backup and imaging seemed fairly close.

Last year I decided to help out a friend clone his old drive to a new drive using Paragon Partition Manager. The first time I cloned it I had to bring his drive back to my home so I could wipe it and start over clean because his drive wouldn't boot.

I attempted the second time with the clone and the results were that the drive would boot but my friend's drive ended up being half the size accompanied by a messed up layout of partition structures and unallocated data with the restore partition being in the middle of it all.

My friend has held off using the new drive until the old one poops out and the time will come when I will have to figure out how I'm going to fix what problems I may be dealing with, from the second clone job.

My friend's old drive is an 80GB from a Dell Inspiron 2400 desktop computer and his new drive is a 160GB Western Digital and as far as I can tell I have clone drives before but when I hit a dell computer things seem to not work out right for me.

Below is a screen cap from last year showing what I'm up against:
http://rjschat.dyndns.org:8080/Paranoha/PICTURES/paragon-unalloc.jpg

Now that I look at that image I can't determine if E is the dell partition but heavily resized or if the small rectangle to the left of it is?

I did follow the instructions as I normally do when cloning a drive and I have no clue how things ended up like this? I can't seem to move the small partitions anywhere on the outside and from what someone had told me one time that I might have a problem trying to merge the unallocated part, after formatting it, with C drive since it is non-contingent?

I can't remember how E drive got there since my friend only had one main partition, that of C drive only.

To be honest I did offer to my friend that in this case it may be better to just back up what ever is important and just cleanly put straight XP back on and ditch the Dell stuff and that I would download all of the needed motherboard and hardware drivers for his system. He said "no" I want everything where I know where it is, so that isn't an option.

He also doesn't have the original Dell disks neither so it looks like I have only one shot at this.

Someone else, before me, applied a full XP Pro install over his Dell install. I asked him why was this done? He replied: "Beats me, I know nothing about computers"

If anybody has any idea, I sort of do but not sure, about how to merge the unallocated space after formatting it this would be great.

My idea would be to format the unallocated parts then do a merge to C drive and somehow move the Dell part to the end. The problem I did face was that I couldn't just move the small partition to the end manually so I don't know if this is a problem or not?

Thanks for anyone who may be able to have some suggestions about this problem. Thanks for all of your time.

[Mech_An]

Hi rjisinspired,

Please try the following:
1) Perform Copy old HDD to new HDD with 'HDD raw processing' enabled:
* Go to Tools - Setting Copy/Backup options and mark 'HDD raw processing'. Close Settings
*Run Copy Hard Disk Wizard and follow it as usually.
* Wait until operation will be completed
2) As Dell specific restore partition will not work on new HDD, you can simply delete this last partition (FAT 3GB).
3) Enlarge C:/ partition to cover all unallocated space on new HDD or create additional partition for Data on free space
4) If copied WinXP fails to start, try to perform start-up repair from WinXP installation CD

[rjisinspired]

Thanks for your response Mech_An.

There may be a chance that I may need to skip step 1 and work on his existing new disk since there is already data on the C drive partition that my friend may not want to get rid of because as he had stated to me: "I have all my icons and everything right where I want them." He isn't going to get another hard drive neither to do a new copy since he prefers what's on the existing new drive to be left intact.

If it was me I would prefer to do a fresh new copy over again but my friend may not be for this and this will make things much hard for me.

At this point the only thing I can recommend to him is to backup anything he may need to a CD in the event of a failure and forget his idea of "everything right where I want them" He isn't going to like this.

I'm noticing that the unallocated spot right at the end is 2 TB??? This is way off. Should be 74.5 GB. Thinking of just hosing the "E" partition. Don't know about the first entry for 7.2MB for the undesignated (*) logical disk section. Looks like another "dell" partition.

I don't see an easy way out of this. As I said my friend has his ways and he wants everything right where it is.