Changing out Hard Drive (XP Pro)

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Ok Guys . Whats the best way to change out Hard Drives and keep all my settings , connections & files . I want to take my old hard drive and put in my other machine . My new drive is 40G My old is a 20G both are Maxtors. Could I plug my new 40G into my Computer as the Primary Secondary and use Partition Magic to partition it (making one partition a primary and the others logical partitions) and then use Windows Transfer Wizard to Transfer everything over to the Primary Partition and then change it over to my Primary Master and reboot ?

Update: Ok I have now installed the new 40G as my Secondary Master Used Partition Magic to format and Partition. I made two Partitions D: Primary Active
E: Logical
Now how can I Transfer everything including XP system from my 20G(5400RPM) Primary Master(C:) To my 40G(7200RPM) Secondary Master(D:) Both are Maxtor I tried with the Maxtor when I was installing the 40G but it got about 50% of the way and had an error about reading one of the registers or something like that, But then again I have never had much luck with the Maxtor File & Transfer.

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When I got 2 new computers at the beginning of the year, I built one and completely installed everything I needed on the hard drive. I then built the other and used Norton Ghost to replcate the disc for the other. Absolutely no problems. Ghost will happily copy to a larger disc and enquire how you want it partitioned. The latest version works with XP and NTFS.

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I’ll have to second Doug’s suggestions on using a ghosting program to copy the entire contents of your hard drive over. If you like PowerQuest’s products, Drive Image has a similar if not slightly richer feature set than Norton’s Ghost. I know you probably don’t want to go out and spend more money, but if anything gets screwed up in the transfer because you tried to do it on the cheap, you’re going to be living a nightmare – and that will cost you lots of time, perhaps more money and likely a whole lotta beauty sleep.

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When you use a product like Drive Image to transfer over to a Formatted & Partitioned New Drive (using Partition Magic) Do you still have to load the XP System 1st , or will Drive Image Transfer everything including XP system?

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This is from the product information page on PowerQuest’s website:

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Safely Restore Your Data

Drive Image makes an exact copy of everything on your hard drive, including the operating system, applications and all of your data
Image Explorer allows you to browse for and restore individual files or folders from an existing image
With SmartSector

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