how to migrate my system disk

okay, so i have a raid setup that's been sketchy for some time. i've finally decided to go non-raid and i've got an extra drive to put my current windows xp install onto (from my raid drive).

i had a windows install on this other drive already, but it was minimal and i didn't feel like re-installing everything.

i've got drive1 (windows xp on raid), drive2 (windows xp minimal), drive3 (temp storage)

when booting into drive1, drive1 is C: and drive2 is M:

so what i did was this:

boot into drive2, copy drive1's contents to drive3

boot into drive1, copy drive3's contents into drive2 -- now drive2 and drive1 have the same data

only an issue came up where the drive letters were messed up (because drive2 is M: according to drive1 and now, accordin to itself). but some of the system seems to be on drive C:

no problem, i boot to drive1 and load the registry hive for drive2 and reassign the drive letters there. drive2 is now C: when booting to it. everything's great, only i can't seem to boot without drive1 being around. it hangs right after the login screen.

this seems like a very common issue -- wanting to move your install to another drive (like maybe you drive is having issues or is full). is there a better approach? i'd prefer not to reinstall everything.

 

Drive C is still your main drive and that is the Windows install that you're booting from. Just because you moved the data, your MBR has not changed.

Take drive1 out, leave all the copied data on drive2 - do a re-install of Windows on drive2. All your data/settings will stay, and only operating system files will be changed. This should have the added side affect of fixing your MBR and anything else that might be corrupt because of your move.

 

but if i do a re-install of windows, won't that sort of screw up my registry? i have installed all sorts of things onto this system -- including updates. how does a re-install of windows deal with this?

i don't follow the mbr issue. this machine actually boots to linux as well, so the booting process and os selection seems to work fine. it's just that it hangs at the part where i'd actually log in if i don't have my old system drive around and mounted as M:

when i first got things up, i tried to manipulate the drive letters by hand so i used the drive manager to switch some things around (there are other partitions that all seem okay that used this method). but when i tried to swap the system drive letter, i couldn't. originally, my old drive1 was c: and was listed as "healthy (active)" and it's letter would only change after reboot. i changed it to M: i believe (tho if that was my system drive, i don't see how i did that).

anyway, my suspicion is that changing it here rewired some stuff rather than just letting the driver letter change fall thru. so when i boot, instead of some system info being searched for on my boot drive, it's still looking on what WAS C: (drive1) and now M:

M: still shows up as active in the drive manager which implies it's got some system stuff on it. this is my old drive which isn't needed anymore.

 

No - the registry will be fine and any Windows Updates you have downloaded would just redownload themselves (assuming you have auto-update turned on).

Something you failed to mention... What bootloader do you use?

The lesson to take away here is: if you don't know what your doing, manually changing drive letters on your system disk is probably not the best idea. Windows is not smart, and throwing it a curve ball like that really messes with it.

 

Might as well go ahead and run Microsoft Update instead of waiting on the automatic to install.

If anyone knows where that is in the registry, odds are they do know what they're doing. But it is best to change it so it makes sense to Windows, and not change it due to a guess.

 

so basically running a repair, right?

grub. but i don't see how that's an issue. i can select the windows os i wish to boot to and it goes as far as showing me that it's booting windows xp with the little bar that rolls over and over and it just keeps on keeping on (i had thought it failed after the login selection, but i think that was an earlier stage in the process).

i think it's a shame that you have to resort to such risky practices to simply migrate to a new drive. it's odd that ms doesn't consider the possibility that somebody might have a drive that's going south on them and provide them a simple means to migrate over to a new one without having to re-install and/or jump thru hoops.

 

yeah, i didn't change anything as a guess.

essentially what i've got a raid setup with a few disks/partitions -- windows os, data files, a cache disk for things like temp internet files, a disk with my important info (raid 1)

i bought a couple new drives and recreated a similar layout on them. moving drive letters around with the disk manager is easy if they're not "active" or "system" disks.

the problem comes when moving over the registry data from one drive to another since the registry records the drive letter assignments. i thought i had corrected the issue with the drive letter assignments via regedit (on the drives i couldn't use the drive manager to alter), but clearly something else is funky.

 

Where's the other RAID 1 drive? And where is your Linux partition in this list?

Just FYI - given what little information you've given and not knowing exactly what you have changed/broken - it's not likely anyone here is going to be able to diagnose your problem.

My advice: get rid of the RAID setup. Get a large capacity external drive and do automatic backups of your important data (or full system backup).

 

i've actually got 4 drives in my system right now. two are set up as a raid group with one virtual disk being 700gb and another as 45gb. the 700gb is a raid0. the 45 gb is also a raid0, but used to be a raid1 of half that size. i switched it because i did something a while back where one of my hard drives in the raid config would not always boot up correctly (the raid hardware wouldn't recognize it as being in the raid for some reason). i could get it to work by first booting to ubuntu linux -- only as far as for ubuntu to fail because it couldn't fsck the raid drives. at that point, the physical hd would be recognized as being part of a raid group and everything would be fine -- except my raid1 set would have been tainted by the messed up boot and need to be rebuilt by the operating system driver (this is an intel matrix oboard raid controller).

i've got a 320gb drive that i created to migrate my operating system onto and a 500gb drive to get all my data.

but i don't think any of that is really pertinent to the issue i'm having and really only muddies the water.

the basic problem is that i'd like to take my os from one drive and move it to another. i thought i had accomplished that, but the first drive seems to need to be around for my new drive to boot up properly. the old drive is listed as "active" in the drive manager which makes me think it's still being referenced for some system info.

i've tried to keep to the important facts without throwing out extra info that is unrelated. and i'm totally prepared to redo what i've done "the right way" if there is such a thing.

that's kind of the whole point of this. i'm phasing out the raid setup because it's been more trouble than it's worth. but getting my os off of it without starting from scratch is my goal. it seems like a pretty obvious thing people would want to do, i'm surprised it's not more easy.