OT: Replaced boot drive now what?

Bob Greaves wrote on 2/15/2005, 11:19 AM
I had a system crash on one computer and decided to upgrade the system drive on another at the same time. Both computers are now running Windows XP Pro on a 160GB system drive.

I used the Western Digital software to copy the system drive to the replacement drive. At first, things seemed to be ok but I did have to reinstall some stuff to get it to work correctly. I had to reinstall Vegas and DVDA on one computer and had to reinstall sound drivers on the other.

Since then I have discovered various other problems crop up. Windows update cannot update the netframework with the latest update. The web update fails to install and so does the downlaod and run later. When I try to debug, the update program claims that the jre debugger is present but not properly registered. No matter what I uninstall reinstall nothing so far has worked.

Two Questions:
1) Anyone else having problems running XP after replacing the system drive?

2) If I were to use Ghost to capture the image of the boot drive, can I restore that image to a larger drive later?

Comments

kentwolf wrote on 2/15/2005, 11:24 AM
>>2) If I were to use Ghost to capture the image of the boot drive, can I
>>restore that image to a larger drive later?

Yes, but...you may need something like Partition Magic to resize the drive partition, or you will have wasted disk space.
JJKizak wrote on 2/15/2005, 11:35 AM
Not that I'm an expert but my guru buddy says the only way to install a boot drive is to re-install the entire computer from scratch. He even does all of the other drives over as they always have info on them from the previous install that is hidden. He double "0's" them to make sure nothing at all is on them. I kind of don't follow his rules however.

JJK
Bob Greaves wrote on 2/15/2005, 11:58 AM
I used a special program that took my original XP (no sp) install disk and replaced files as necessary to update it to sp2. Before I go the route of doing a total reinstall, I think I will try a repair install. I will let you know how it went.

If it proves unsuccessful I may have to do a total reinstall. I plan to replace the activation info, but I tell you it makes me nervous. On one system I have Frontpage 2003 as well. When you get these activation programs on a system that ocasionally gets upgraded and updated it can create problems.
kentwolf wrote on 2/15/2005, 2:11 PM
>>...Not that I'm an expert but my guru buddy says the only way to install a boot drive is to re-install the entire computer from scratch....

If you redo the disk partition, you lose nothing.

The only hitch is that you may need to use the accompanying new hard drive disk utilities to make the disk the bootable, active partition. If you have Partition Magic, you can do the same thing.

As long as the new drive is bootable, if you restore the disk partition, it is a bit-for-bit clone/copy of the original.
riredale wrote on 2/15/2005, 2:30 PM
I have transported my original w98 setup back in 1999 from the original 4GB drive to an 8, 15, 40, and now 80GB drive. More significantly, I have transported that original setup from the original Compaq motherboard to a new Gigabyte motherboard, and from that board to my current ECS motherboard. In addition, the setup has been transplanted to my Dell Inspiron laptop. Along the way the OS changed from w98se to XPpro.

I have never had to start from scratch, and in fact doing so would be a painful experience simply because I have so much junk loaded and configured (wXP informs me that I currently have 59 processes running in the background right now).

The disk-to-disk transfers have been the easiest. Just use an imaging utility such as DriveImage. I assume Ghost would have worked as well, as well as the transfer utilities that come with new drives. Don't know for sure, however.

The transitions to different motherboards are much more involved, because different motherboards use different chipsets to talk to the hard drives. But even here you can configure your current setup so that everything can be transfered over cleanly. See this thread from about this time last year, when I made the move to my current motherboard.

EDIT:
Just noticed that Microsoft changed the KnowledgeBase location for the information mentioned in the above thread. You can find the info here.