Copying Your Hard Drive

[wulf109]

Is there any software that will copy all files from a WindowsXP hard drive to a new hard drive? I've tried the software that comes bundled with Maxtor and Western Digital hard drives,but these softwares leave as many as 300 files un-copied,rendering the new hard drive un-bootable.

[oldandinthe way]

xxclone - freeware

[aedipuss]

there are programs like trueimage. the problem is that unless you boot to just dos, not windows there will always be uncopyable files - locked, in use, etc.

[plcpower]

I think Norton Ghost will handle that for you.

[fritzi93]

Is there any software that will copy all files from a WindowsXP hard drive to a new hard drive? I've tried the software that comes bundled with Maxtor and Western Digital hard drives,but these softwares leave as many as 300 files un-copied,rendering the new hard drive un-bootable.

That's odd, DataLifeguard always works perfectly when I want to clone a drive. You're certain you ticked the box for the copy to be bootable? Oh, and it's recommended that you do a defrag first, don't have anything unnecessary running, blah blah.

[AlanHK]

xxclone - freeware

Yes. I used that recently when replacing a laptop drive.
The new drive was bootable and everything seemed in place. Works even if the drives are different sizes and formats. I moved from a single 10 GB drive to a 20 GB partitioned in 12 and 8 GB (it's an oldish laptop, but running XPSP2).

However my first attempt failed, with the target drive NTSF formatted. I reformatted it FAT32 and it was fine. But this may be a peculiarity of my setup, with the new drive connected by USB cable, most people have no issues.

[wulf109]

Many thanx for the xxclone information. It worked flawlessly.