These days I made myself and my bro a ‘Christmas Gift’ and I bought a couple of 10k rpm hard drives to give our systems some speed up. In my childlike mind I thought: migrate the system will be easy..just clone the HD data to the new one, maybe perform a quick system repair to adjust and driver assignment letter issue that can arise and we are cool.

Well...it was a long journey to figure out how to resolve all the problems we had, today we start with the Windows XP migration, in a next article I’ll talk about the Vista migration.

To successfully migrate a Windows XP installation you need 3 different tools, I tend to use all free stuff if I can:

• A disk cloning tool: EASEUS has a nice and free solution that worked well for me: EASEUS DISK COPY
• A partition manager tool: again EASEUS to the rescue with the free version of EASEUS Partition Master Personal Edition 
• To fix the boot issues that will arise you need to use the Partition Saving suite (in the download section look for the ‘spartiso.zip’ file).

Here are the steps I made:

1. Burn the Disk Copy and Partition Savings in two bootable CDs.
2. Connect the new HD to the system and start Windows from your old IDE drive, this step is needed to let the system load the SATA drivers if required.
3. Boot the Disk Copy tool and perform an copy of the Windows partition to the new drive (it will have the same size of the original one, that’s why you need a partition manager tool after)
4. When finished, just to be safe, remove/disconnect your previous HD and try to boot from the new HD.
5. If it all work you can go to step 14.
   Here’s when my problems arose, instead of seeing the windows logo and the operating system the screen was totally black with the prompt flashing on the upper left corner.
6. Boot from the Partition Savings CD and type ‘savepart’ at the prompt to start the utility
7. Choose "update windows2000/xp/vista registry"
8. Click on the partition that has your system ( “C” usually ) and take note of the drive letter this is your mounted device drive letter.
9. You will now see a list of directories, choose the "WINDOWS" directory
10. On next screen you choose the disk which has the partition whose registry definition you want to update
11. You choose the partition for which you want to update the definition in the registry
12. The last box is the "drive letter to affect this partition" box. You must choose from this list the drive letter you want to be associated with the partition selected with two previous windows. This is where it will show you the "partition ID drive letter" it should be the same as the "mounted device drive letter".
    [extensive documentation can be found in the Partition Saving help files]
13. Reboot the system, it should start without problems and load windows, but your partition will have the same size as the original drive.
14. Install the partition manager tool and resize your partition to take advantage of your new HD.

Enjoy your migrated system :D

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