Best Way to Xfer a Windows XP System

It’s Thanksgiving time which means as I visit my parents for the holiday, I get to fix their computer problems. Yay!

Their system has an old 4GB drive as their boot C: drive (about half full), and a newer 80GB D: drive with maybe 8GB of data on it. The old C: drive has been slowly degrading for a while now and I really need to put their system on a new drive.

It would be nice if I could re-partition the D: drive and give it room for a new bootable C: drive and transfer the system there, but I don’t know of a way to do that without destroying the D: drive data.

Still, drives are cheap enough. I can go buy a new low-capacity drive somewhere here in this small town for less than a $100 bucks, I’m sure. So the real question is, what’s the best way to transfer the contents of the C: drive? Using just the utilities Windows gives you is a pain in the ass. Is there some good software out there that will help me with this?

I’m assuming at least Win98 on that computer already? But same thing will apply to XP. Just copy C: stuff to D. Boot with the XP cd and tell it to install to the 80GB hard drive. It’ll ask to format, convert, or leave alone. If you convert it would just change FAT32 to NTFS (not that important if you don’t know what i mean). Just don’t format since then you’ll loose all the stuff.

Once XP goes thru the install the 80GB will be C: and the other drive will be D:

Partition Magic is your friend.