hi

i would recommend seagate (acronis) discwizard but
i have never used it to move two partitions but can't
see why it would'nt work. you would need to install it
in XP along with the new drive then tell it to clone onto
that new drive.

cya!

I can HIGLY recommend Acronis True image ... it will migrate your data in a larger/smaller/same HDD just fine (assuming they fit on a smaller drive that is) ... have used it numerous times and always a great success!

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb

Sounds like your R2 unit has a bad motivator.

I'd personally find a copy of Ghost 2003, that's the one I've used to the most in work enviroments. Boot off a Ghost 03 floppy (or a bootable CD) and do a Copy>Disk>to Disk. Should even work with Non-DOS partitions and SATA/RAID setups. It'll even have an option to burn a Recovery CD/DVD set as well. You might also find Ghost 2003 on a Hirens or UBCD compilation boot disk.

Remember that for WD drives you can use the free WD version of Acronis. It's on the WD site.

Cool, does Acronis or Ghost also backup the boot options, so that I get the same selection for picking which OS I want to use or will I have to create this one anew once I've transferred the partitions?

Of course! And you can always test your copy onto the new HDD first and see if it all worked out 😁

Yeah, I'd go with Ghost. Once you use it a couple of times, it ends up being a breeze to use, and it has nice compression options if you plan to make system restore disc of large OS installs.

GPartEd is linux-based boot disc which does everything you need it to do, is easy to understand and use, and is completely free:

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

I'd recommend it to everyone over Ghost for everything besides image file creation, which it doesn't feature.

This may sound simplistic but can't you just hook up the new drive as slave or to the secondary IDE port and copy all the files? I have done that before.....

That would kill the MBR and boot sectors

Agreed. If you simply did a straight drive-to-drive file copy, the system wouldn't boot because that doesn't copy the MBR or Boot Sectors, or Partition types for that matter.

And Norton Ghost 03 (the boot floppy, not the full bloatware program) will copy everything, MBR, Boot Sectors, partition types, boot configuration, Non-DOS structures, etc, it'll come out the same as before. I've used it in the past for cloning disk to disk (for bigger or dying HDD issues) or creating a backup set on CD/DVD, plus it's a very uncomplicated program to use. And there's also switches in the settings to force cloning even when bad sectors are detected.

Guess I'll be using Ghost for the job, thanks guys!

So, I got a another drive, this one 160GB, created two partitions and cloned the ones from my original HDD to the new one. The one containing Windows ME though complained about some files not being copied. I tried again with the same luck and as I expected it doesn't work perfectly.
I get the same boot screen from WinXP, so I'm given the option to boot to WinXP or WinME. XP boots fine, ME gives me a system disk not present error and if I press enter it restarts the boot process.
What bugs me is that the ME partition is Primary and the XP one is Logical and this is how it was on the original HDD too.
I've tried fixing the MBR but have only gotten the same results. What can I do about that? Can I install WinME or 98 anew and still get the same boot options (XP/9x) or is that not possible?

Oh and a couple of other things...
It appears that the "new" (actually given to me by a friend) also shuts down whenever it feels like it. Smells like PSU right? 🤣
I'm running a ,unfortunately, Rex Power PSU (whatever...) at 450Watt on a Pentium 4 3.2GHz, 2GB Ram and a 6600 GT.
Also, at first I tried to clone my internal HDD to my External HDD, thinking that it would create an image file of some sort. I ended up ruining my external HDD, Windows say it needs formatting.
I have a lot of stuff in there that I'd like to get back, but the only way I've found is using FileScavenger. Unfortunately, it fucks up with the filenames 🙄 .
Any way I can make that one readable again?

Thanks for all the help so far guys!

F2bnp wrote:

I get the same boot screen from WinXP, so I'm given the option to boot to WinXP or WinME. XP boots fine, ME gives me a system disk not present error and if I press enter it restarts the boot process.
What bugs me is that the ME partition is Primary and the XP one is Logical and this is how it was on the original HDD too.
I've tried fixing the MBR but have only gotten the same results. What can I do about that? Can I install WinME or 98 anew and still get the same boot options (XP/9x) or is that not possible?

You're using the XP bootloader, then? I didn't even know it could do that.

I'd be inclined to suggest switching to Grub4DOS, but actually the first thing to check would be to try setting the Active flag of the ME partition, as that's one thing that might not have been set by the imaging process. That might do it.

Also, at first I tried to clone my internal HDD to my External HDD, thinking that it would create an image file of some sort. I ended up ruining my external HDD, Windows say it needs formatting.
I have a lot of stuff in there that I'd like to get back, but the only way I've found is using FileScavenger. Unfortunately, it fucks up with the filenames 🙄 .
Any way I can make that one readable again?

What sort of cloning tool did you use, and what sort of external drive is it?

The ME partition is the Active one, that's the weird part... XP partition won't even accept an Active flag (possibly because it is a logical partition?).
I used Ghost 2003 at first (with my external drive, a Maxtor 500GB HDD running on its own power supply) and then Ghost 15 for the results I have now.

Indeed, logical partitions can't be set as Active. (Not normally, anyway, and they're certainly not supposed to be.)

I suppose if you really want to, you can back up your MBR (somehow?) and then use "sys c:" on the hard drive from an ME boot floppy. You won't be able to get back into XP until you restore the XP bootloader one way or another, but it might be useful for diagnostic purposes.

Alternatively, you can try editing the XP bootloader's boot.ini , though I'm not sure what exactly you might need to change.