Copying Partitions - Problem!

Hello all,

I want to copy the C: partition (~20GB) of my Seagate 80gig IDE drive to my new Seagate 15K U160 SCSI drive which is 34GB in size. However, TrueImage says that this can't be done because my new harddrive is way smaller than the old one - this sounds odd to me because I cannot even pick single partitions to be copied to my scsi drive. Is this not supported by Trueimage or what else could be the problem? All I want is the Xp Pro SP2 installation from the ide drive copied to the scsi drive so I can use that for booting the OS. Please help me out!

 

Hello Thorns,

Several questions before anyone can come up with a definitive solution. The good news is that it can be done but it will not be a single stage process.
Version and build no. of True Image?
What other partitions do you have on the 80gig drive?
How much unused space in each partition?
Any unallocated space on the drive?
Do you have a partition management tool?
Do you have any other HDDs on your computer?
If yes is there free space and how much and where?
Do you have an external HDD available?
CD burner?
DVD burner?

I am guessing that your copy attempt was using the Acronis Clone method. This is inappropriate for what you want to do. Imaging/Restore is the way to go but the actual way to do it depends very much on the hardware and software facilities that you have available.

Xpilot

 

Normally one would use the "clone" option of True Image to copy all of one hard drive to another, usually larger hard drive.

There is no "copy partition" option in TI.

But, there is an option to make a partition image, then restore that image to anywhere you want. This requires an intermediate storage location. The easiest is a different partition on one of the hard drives. The next easiest is an external USB or firewire disk. But, CDs or DVDs can be used.

One caution: when a partition image is restored, that does NOT, by itself, make the hard drive bootable, even if it is the partition with the operating system. One need to manually make the new hard drive bootable. Fortunately Acronis offer a free tool to do this:

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=55317

Go about 2/3 the way down in this link and read about fixing the MBR.

 

2nd caution: One you get the partition "copied", do NOT expect XP to boot properly (or at all) ! Since you are switching from IDE to SCSI it is nearly 100% probable that you will need to do a "repair" installation of XP. This is necesssary to permit XP to ask you to feed it drivers for the SCSI controller. These drivers come from the controller manufacturer (motherboard maker if on the motherboard) and not from the disk manufacturer. They must be on a floppy, not on a CD or other media. You will need to hit F6 early in the XP repair process to activate the usage of these drivers. However, the actual drivers may not be read until later in the process.

For this you will need the XP CDROM that was used to install the system, or a slip-streamed version of the same with SP1 or 2. If XP came pre-installed, and if you do not own the XP CDROM, do not attempt this operation.

Once the repair is done, you will need to re-do Windows Update to re-install all updates later than the date of the XP CDROM. It is for this reason that using a slip-streamed CDROM (original XP plus SP2) is recommended, unbless your CD is already SP2.

Links to doing a repair of XP:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;315341

http://www.webtree.ca/windowsxp/repair_xp.htm

http://www.extremetech.com/print_article/0,3998,a=23979,00.asp

Links to slip-streaming:

http://www.theeldergeek.com/slipstreamed_xpsp2_cd.htm

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_sp2_slipstream.asp

http://help.lockergnome.com/lofiversion/index.php/t33272.html

The following links to a tool called "nLite" that can greatly simplifiy slip-streaming. Just avoid the temptation to remove anything from windows, which it can also do:

http://www.nliteos.com/index.html