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Serben
Banned
Posts: 1428
Location: Sweden
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 Posted: Tue, 21st Feb 2006 20:10 Post subject: Transferring an entire windows partition intact |
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My hard drive has broken, and i'm buying a new one soon. I can still use the current one but it has all kinds of problems. It gives me all kinds of weird errors when i use hard drive repair software and defragging software, and tells me my hard drive has physical faults on it. Anyway, it can still boot up and run programs (although they crash a lot) so i'm hoping i can transfer all my data from it to a new one that i'll be buying soon. Anyway, i was wondering if anyone knows the DOS command to transfer all the files from one partition to another?
I don't want to have to waste an entire day re-installing and configuring windows and downloading all the updates, so i was thinking maybe i could use DOS to to transfer the entire windows partition on to a freshly formatted hard drive, and keep it intact so i won't have to re-install windows from scratch? Is this possible?
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| Posted: Tue, 21st Feb 2006 20:27 Post subject: |
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Honestly if you are having all those problems, chances are your bad drive has corrupted a shit-load of files on your system. Would recommend you spend the time to reinstall.
But if you still want to transfer contents from one drive to another, Ghost from Symantec, or other Drive Imaging software is what you will need.
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Serben
Banned
Posts: 1428
Location: Sweden
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| Posted: Tue, 21st Feb 2006 21:08 Post subject: |
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Well the thing is that this hard drive is only 1 month old. So i'm guessing it's only a small defect since i can still boot up windows and use it without any crashes. It's only when i run programs that i get errors here and there. And when i use repair software like system mechanic it also says my harddrive has faults. But other than that it seems that most data is still intact. And i have all my 100 gigs of warez on this computer, a lot of which is really old classics and stuff that is impossible to replace and has sentimental value to me. That's why i'm hoping to be able to make a full system restore with the new harddrive, and hopefully get my money back for the broken one. Thanks for the advice on imaging software, that's just what i need.
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[sYn]
[Moderator] Elitist
Posts: 8374
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| Posted: Tue, 21st Feb 2006 21:37 Post subject: |
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| morpheus69 wrote: | Honestly if you are having all those problems, chances are your bad drive has corrupted a shit-load of files on your system. Would recommend you spend the time to reinstall.
But if you still want to transfer contents from one drive to another, Ghost from Symantec, or other Drive Imaging software is what you will need. |
The above is very good advice, you should take it. However, if you still want to do things the bad way.. the command is
copy c:\*.* e:\
(obviously replacing C:\ and e:\ for the drive letters you want to copy from and too..)
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| Posted: Tue, 21st Feb 2006 21:46 Post subject: |
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well...if it's an NT system (Win2000/XP) then don't bother....If you replace your HD you have to reinstall windows. NT has some advanced security measures built in so swapping HDs will lead to windows lock down.
rgds
Sabalasa
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[sYn]
[Moderator] Elitist
Posts: 8374
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| Posted: Tue, 21st Feb 2006 22:06 Post subject: |
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| sabalasa wrote: | | well...if it's an NT system (Win2000/XP) then don't bother....If you replace your HD you have to reinstall windows. NT has some advanced security measures built in so swapping HDs will lead to windows lock down. |
Im pretty sure these security measures lock the installation to the hardware, not to the hard drive. So if you pull a HDD out of one machine and put it into another it wont work, but moving the install to a new HDD should be fine.
Although, I may be wrong on this.
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| Posted: Tue, 21st Feb 2006 23:15 Post subject: |
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| sabalasa wrote: | | well...if it's an NT system (Win2000/XP) then don't bother....If you replace your HD you have to reinstall windows. NT has some advanced security measures built in so swapping HDs will lead to windows lock down. |
That's not true, you can always copy a partition with an imaging tool like drive image to a new hd and put that in your pc to replace a broken one. Have done that at work dozens of times.
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| Posted: Wed, 22nd Feb 2006 00:00 Post subject: |
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| whoKnows wrote: | | sabalasa wrote: | | well...if it's an NT system (Win2000/XP) then don't bother....If you replace your HD you have to reinstall windows. NT has some advanced security measures built in so swapping HDs will lead to windows lock down. |
That's not true, you can always copy a partition with an imaging tool like drive image to a new hd and put that in your pc to replace a broken one. Have done that at work dozens of times. |
hmmm...hasn't worked for me though...
Maybe I did something wrong. I used Ghost and my xp pro didn't let me in after restoring the partition on a new HD. I had the feeling that xp stores the unique HD serial number into the product key hash together with other hardware IDs and if it changes, then the damn security lock down kicks in, because of a possible major security hole (for example your machine is a member of a domain and your user has administrative privileges and then you bring a new HD from some other machine with the same OS and same hardware. You swap the HDs and the OS allows you access someone's personal files or delicate data).
Anyway, I didn't bother any longer after the lock down, because I allways have at least 4 partitions - 1.System (C), 2.WinProgs (replacement for c:\program files), 3.Personal and 4.Swap. This way my files are OK even if I have to install a fresh windows. I have to reinstall all proggies though but I have a list of programs that I used on WinProgs and overwrite doesn't take too much time.
rgds
Sabalasa
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