How can I clone an XP drive and install that on a Windows 7 system?
January 26, 2013 8:06 AM   Subscribe

I have two laptops, an old XP machine with a dying power supply, and a new Windows 7 machine that could easily store the old XP harddrive. Can I clone the XP drive and make a dual boot system on the Windows 7 machine?
posted by filthy light thief to Computers & Internet (4 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
It's unlikely that you'll be able to take a disk image (clonezilla, Ghost, etc) or an existing XP Home or XP Pro system and boot it on a new system as the HAL/kernel will be different. One thing you can do is use a physical to virtual tool to make a VMWare Workstation image of your existing XP system. Another is to make an image of the disk and not use that to boot from, but to mount and transfer your existing data over onto the Windows 7 machine.
posted by thewalrus at 8:40 AM on January 26, 2013 [2 favorites]


You can use DisktoVHD to make a copy of the HD (get a USB to IDE/SATA converter to hook the hard drive in, I own and use this one), and then you can run that VHD file through VirtualBox and you will have a computer running inside your computer (yo dawg). You cannot use it to set up a dual boot box, but you could still run things from inside the VirtualBox window.
posted by deezil at 1:19 PM on January 27, 2013


Response by poster: I'm looking for a way to run the old XP system, and a virtual machine sounds perfect. The issue is that there is old software that is installed and works under WinXP, but doesn't work with Windows 7.

thewalrus, thanks for the general idea of what I'm looking for, and for what I can't do.

deezil, DisktoVHD sounds like just the thing. From this article, it looks like I can either create a partition on the XP drive to make a VHD from the XP system, without having to get a second physical drive involved.

Given that my efforts are focused on getting a single program to work under a virtual XP system, I'll read some more and give this a try. Thanks!
posted by filthy light thief at 4:12 PM on January 27, 2013


Response by poster: Disk2VHD looked great. I got it up and running easily, and everything was wonderful, until it stopped copying, displaying the error message: "The parameter is incorrect."

I found one forum where the suggestion was to run chkdsk c: /f /r, which I did. It looked like there weren't any issues found, and Disk2VHD still stopped copying after a few gigs. Any ideas?

Details: I'm running Disk2vhd v1.63, where I checked "Prepare for use in Virtual PC," copying 50.11 GB of a 55.88 GB HD from the laptop harddrive to an external HDD, over USB 2 (I think).

I think I'll try moving all extra data I can off of the old HDD, to see if I can get it down to less than 25 GB, so I can back up the HDD onto itself. My other thought was to install Disk2VHD to the external HDD, though I'm not really sure the issues is that the program is running from the same partition that is being copied.
posted by filthy light thief at 8:20 PM on March 3, 2013


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