How to upgrade to a bigger disk?

Question

I've a laptop (IBM T42) which has its current bog standard 30GB disk, the user is running out of space and thus I'm upgrading them to a 160GB disk.

I'd rather avoid paying the Windows XP license again (It currently has an OEM IBM-provided install) so ideally I'd like to clone the small disk to the bigger. I attempted to do this using Clonezilla however it failed due to multiple corruption errors (I can't recall the exact error) on the main partition (secondary partition cloned fine) which is strange as Windows can boot into it fine. The image was being saved to a USB external drive and I attempted to restore which was successful however upon booting it fails with a disk error. I even re-tried with "dd" the famous disk replication tool however the same errors occurred.

How can I resolve this? I don't mind using a different cloning tool (or something else?) however would prefer it be free.

Thanks

Answer 1

The disk has errors - probably in the free space Windows isn't currently using, or files that aren't being used.

First, fix the errors, probably with something like Spinrite

Answer 2

I've had good luck cloning with Acronis and I've heard good things about Norton Ghost as well.

So long as you aren't changing too much hardware you should be OK.

Answer 3

A free solution would be XXClone. It might get round your errors since it doesn't do a traditional disk image clone.

A pay for solution which has consistently worked for me when I went from the 30GB hard disk in my X31 to a 100GB to a 250GB one is Acronis Migrate Easy. (I still can't post more than one direct link, sorry!) There's a trial version so if other free solutions fail, you can give it a go and only pay if it works.

Answer 4

I would prefer Acronis, but it's not free. My first free preference would be Clonezilla: http://gpartedclonz.tuxfamily.org/

Answer 5

I have used Clonezilla successfully in cases like this. It would be the first tool I would reach for to do this job.

Perhaps you should run chkdsk and maybe defrag on the current disk before trying to make the image.

I would be interested to hear how you solved this in the end.

Answer 6

Maybe you got some bad sectors from the old drive, have you tried running 'chkdsk /r /f' on it before cloning the drive ?

If it still can not boot, we need the specific error message to help you further. Try inserting the windows installation cd, and choose repair windows installation. It won't delete your user settings and program files.

Answer 7

Have you not got a "rescue disk" that would let you reinstall "as new" on to he new HD, before then using XP's settings transfer wizard to get across the personal settings, et al.?

Answer 8

Actually, even though it is an OEM license, if you reinstall it on your new HDD and it won't activate, there is a link to a MS phone number. Call that activation hot line and they will manually activate it for you, just explain that it is the same hardware minus the HDD. I've done this literally hundreds of times without incident.

Answer 9

Personally I have an old copy of Ghost 2003. Best ghost ever imo. It can clone and resize disks while ignoring errors. There is probably better things to use now a days, but this one is great.

Answer 10

I just did a successful clone by plugging my disks into a linux box and using ntfsclone and ntfsresize from the ntfsprogs suite. I basically followed instructions for cloning using Linux but (a) copied with ntfsclone instead of dd and (b) found I had to resize the file system with ntfsresize after enlarging the partition using qtparted.

If you can, you're much better off avoiding USB disks, since they are very slow, but if the laptop is your only computer you can still do it via USB.

Answer 11

try Clonezilla.

1.Its Free of cost. GPL licensed 2.Can do a complete copy 3.can backup and restore MBR 4. works if your source and destination disks/partitios are of different sizes (need to work in expert mode for this and avoid overwriting existing filesystem)