New laptop clone HDD

[rockhoptec]

Got a quick question for anyone. I got a customer who ordered a new HP laptop and wanted a bigger HDD installed. Windows XP Pro, so I configured the original HDD by the basic setup like setting up user, and all the normal stuff when starting up a new PC. After that I connected the new HDD via usb and booted from a CD to clone the HDD to the new HDD. Everything went off without any problems. I removed the original HDD, put the new one in and rebooted. It booted, went into Windows and this is when things went wild.

First attempt tried using Spotmau, cloned drive to drive, booted new HDD went into Windows, machine said found new HD and needed to reboot. Rebooted and got nothing.

Second attempt tried using Spotmau, partition to partition, booted new HDD went into Windows, few minutes later crashed and got nothing.

Third attempt tried using Bart PE with DriveImage XML and booted from CD and got a BSOD.

Between each attempt removed new HDD, replaced with original HDD booted into Windows XP and then tried the next attempt.

So now I am doing the long round about way and installing a Fresh copy of Windows XP Pro.

My question is this what do you use to clone an old HDD to new HDD? Do you do drive to drive or partition to partition?

Thanks for any input you might have, and one last thing I thought it was a bad MBR and tried a repair without any luck.

Thanks for reading,
Todd

 

[purple_minion]

You're gonna need the mbr and the partition table intact, and then most likely need to make the partition bigger (or better yet partition it so all their data is on a second one!). I would have used dd from my linux SystemRescueCD as it has never let me down. Then I would have probably used gparted to increase the partition size and grow the NTFS filesystem. Then again I don't do a lot of cloning so I could be going about this all wrong.

I know with linux if you make any partition bigger you have to then tell the filesystem to use up more space, perhaps it's the same with ntfs and that's where it gets hung up. Did you do a fixboot and fixmbr from recovery console?

There are many choices for cloning, g4l (formally ghost for linux), Acronis, Ghost, clonezilla. Interestingly there is a tool called ntfsclone that comes on knoppix I just heard of... hmmm...

 

[purple_minion]

http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=134457
http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=149328
http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=151679