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Part of my problem is pretty common: I bought new HDD for my computer (notebook) and now want to move Windows XP system to the new disk.
My specific problem is that the system on the old disk doesn't have its own partition. It shares one disk-wide partition with another 250GB of my work data.
I tried couple "disk imaging" apps that should be able to move my system. Namely EaseUS Todo Backup
and Macrium Reflect
(trial versions) but when I choose "System backup", both offer only to create image of whole disk.
I need to copy only system installation data and data connected to it - like 'Documents and Settings' and 'Program Files' dirs. Making a (unnecessarily) huge image of whole disk woun't solve it in my situation.
Am I doing something wrong / missed some settings in some of the apps ?
Or do full versions of those apps support what I need ? (I found little info on the apps webs.)
Is there a way to do it some other way ? Perhaps using some other tool ?
EDIT: Thanks for clarifications on cloning bootable partition. What about simply copying all system files and dirs to new disk and then making it bootable / repair system boot ? I remeber it should be possible somehow (I probably have done that in the past), but Im having hard time finding the old tutorials for it.
Thanks for any advice.
You simply cannot selectively copy a bootable OS partition. The Windows registry effectively prevents that. Copy/clone the entire partition, and then use the 'add/remove programs' utility to remove installed programs and Windows Explorer for deleting files & directories. But my preferred method would be to perform a fresh install. But I did this for 2 WinXP systems this month, and Windows Update is non-responsive to old (not SP3) versions. You have to manually download and update the XP system to SP3 and IE8. – sawdust – 2013-12-26T07:08:41.820
What about simply copying all system files and dirs to new disk and then making it bootable / repair system boot ? (Edited my question also) – Riva – 2013-12-28T09:44:39.933
My original comment still applies. If you did this in the past, then it was probably a simpler OS like MS-DOS. – sawdust – 2013-12-28T21:40:20.727
As far as I remember I have done this with Windows 2000. Thats of course a long time ago and I think the process was quite complicated. -- (MS-DOS of course was so simple it was possible to copy its installation from one PC to another and it didn't find a difference :) But that doesn't apply to us in 2013) – Riva – 2013-12-29T21:23:58.710