Upgrading to a larger HD on xp machine

J

jskamm

New Member
Hi, can anyone help me?

I have a Dell Optiplex 520 running win xp pro sp3. Going to upgrade to win 7 but need to add a larger HD first.

Currently have a 80GB Sata HD and bought a 500 GB WD Sata HD to replace the 80 gig.

Downloaded clonezilla to clone an 80 GB HD onto a new WD 500 GB HD which will ultimately be the new drive on my xp machine. The clone process seemed to work perfectly. I then removed the old 80 gig Drive and installed the clone drive(500GB HD). Then booted up the machine and now it says can't find boot device. I've gone into bios and changed the boot sequence back to original sequence(HD first).

Do I need to install some kind of bootloader? I thought by cloning the old drive to a new HD, all you would have to do is swap out the drives and then reboot. I can see the image that clonezilla wrote to the new drive, just can't figure out how to get the new HD to boot up.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.
 
You can't upgrade XP to 7, fresh install only. So my suggestion to you would be to install 7 on the big drive and use the smaller as a storage drive.
 
I understand you need to do a fresh install for xp to 7. I'm not doing that. I'm trying to clone the old HD onto the new bigger HD. And then swap out the old drive with the new drive.

The cloning process seemed to work perfectly. But now during bootup it say it can't find a bootup device. Do I need some kind of bootloader on the new drive? Can someone offer any assistance?
 
Download and use western digitals acronis software that will clone the old to the new.

http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp?swid=119

You most likely didn't do it right so its not bootable. Acronis will do it correctly and make it bootable.

If you have windows 7 now, just don't even bother cloning xp to the bigger drive, just install 7 to the bigger drive and copy your data over.
 
One other question, please. If I put 7 on the new drive and transfer the data over, can I also transfer the programs over and have them function on the new drive. Or will I have to reinstall all of my programs on the new drive with win 7?
 
I'm Sorry. One last question. Should I just use windows easy transfer to transfer all of my data and user?
 
jskamm said:
One other question, please. If I put 7 on the new drive and transfer the data over, can I also transfer the programs over and have them function on the new drive. Or will I have to reinstall all of my programs on the new drive with win 7?
Click to expand...
You will need to reinstall all of your programs.

jskamm said:
I'm Sorry. One last question. Should I just use windows easy transfer to transfer all of my data and user?
Click to expand...
Sure, that's what windows easy transfer is for.
 
Thanks for your reply.

I know thats what the easy transfer program is for, I just thought someone might have other suggestions.

I'll give all the above a shot and reply with the results.
 
Just an update.

Downloaded the western digitals acronis software utility located at http://support.wdc.com/product/downl...l.asp?swid=119 and ran the clone your hard drive program and it worked perfectly. I was able to clone my old 80 gig HD to my new 500 gig HD and then swap them out and now I'm able to boot up to the new 500 GB HD and run all my old programs.

Thanks to everyone that assisted!!
 
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