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General discussion

Transfer old drive to new drive in new PC - HELP PLEASE

Jul 19, 2005 4:30AM PDT

Old PC: Dell 8200, 2 HDD's (1 Maxtor 80GB for OS and apps, 1 WD 80GB for misc files), Intel III 1.8GHz, 512KB RAM. Win XP Pro.

New PC: eMachines T6212, 1 HDD (Seagate Barracuda 160MB), AMD 3200+, 1GB RAM. Win XP Home.

I ghosted my Maxtor drive to the Seagate NTFS partition wihtout a problem. However, the Seagate drive shows two partitions with two logical drive letters (F: (FAT32) and G: (NTFS) ). I tried booting up the new drive in the new machine and I either get a missing hal.dll error or the machine goes straight into the RECOVERY mode (which is resident on the FAT32 partition).

When I put the old drive in the new PC, it comes up fine (BTW: this was after I changed the IDE interface to standard). So, I ghosted the FAT partition from the old drive to the FAT(32) partition of the new drive which would then make everything the same, right? Nope. The new PC says something like "booting from partition" or something like that. It doesn't make sense to me that the old drive works in the new PC but the new drive doesn't work even though they are identical now.

I don't have the original Win XP Pro CD, so I have had to restore the new drive using the emachines restore CD's and therefore, I am back at square one. I really don't want to put an older drive in a new machine especially when I should be able to use the new drive which has double the capacity in the new PC.

Any ideas on how I can get my OS, apps, settings, and everything from my old drive to the new drive for the new PC? (w/p a Win XP Pro CD).

Discussion is locked

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There are tools to do such.
Jul 19, 2005 6:42AM PDT

Look up ALOHA BOB PC RELOCATOR which does much of what you are after.

Bob

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Norton Ghost
Jul 19, 2005 6:55AM PDT

Wouldn't cloning an entire hard drive be better than buying a app transfer utility?

Cons with using Aloha Bob (ref PC Mag):
Not all apps work after migration, requiring reinstallations.

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No.
Jul 19, 2005 7:52AM PDT

You don't have the full XP to fix what is busted.

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: Transfer old drive to new drive in new PC
Jul 19, 2005 6:46AM PDT

Usualy you would use the XP files and transfer wizard to do this, it takes you step by step on how to do this. John

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Norton Ghost
Jul 19, 2005 6:56AM PDT

Same thing. Wouldn't cloning a drive be better than using a file transfer utility?

PC MAG on F.A.S.T.
Pros:
Comes with Windows XP. Transfers Windows and Outlook settings as well as files. Simple and straightforward.
Cons:
No-frills tool with primitive interface provides limited user control, no reports, no undo capability, no application transfer.
Bottom Line:
Provides bare-bones migration of essential data files and Windows settings. Good just for basic transfer.