How to move windows to larger hard drive

[Dharmesh Arora]

I'm trying to upgrade to a larger hard drive on a Windows XP machine. Now I want to upgrade to a bigger hard drive. But the recovery disks will only restore the system to what it was when new. I don't wish to clone the old hard drive since I want the entire new hard drive to be the same drive letter C: instead of two drive letters with a C: drive just as small as before. I get a message telling me that there has been a change in configuration. So, can any body tell me that how to move windows to larger hard drive? Does any body knows how can i do it? Kindly provide me the correct solution for the above issue.

[Devasis]

If you upgrade your operating system hard disk, chances are the new one will be both faster and larger than your original disk. Restore a backup hard drive image, then you can then use the image file to restore individual files or to perform a complete restore of the system to the same hard drive or to a different partition. The one thing to remember though when restoring an image is that the partition you are restoring to needs to be of the same size or larger.

[Solomon]

You could reinstall WindowsXP on the new drive, but that means reinstalling all your software and redoing your personal configurations all over again. When you restore, you cannot restore to the same drive you’re currently running Windows on. EzMigration takes all the work out of moving to a new or larger boot drive or data drive. There's no need to rebuild a drive or to spend hours reinstalling applications and searching the net for updates and drivers. You simply migrate everything in one simple drive copy operation. EzMigration can also help you easily move or expand a drive partition if necessary.

[MrChris-]

The solution to this problem is to clone your old hard disk. I had the exact same problem (1 disk, 2 partitions, the system primary partition, drive C was nearly full). I moved the pagefile.sys out to the larger drive D. This method uses software to make an exact bit-by-bit mirror image of everything on the old operating system hard drive so it can be transferred to a new hard drive. You need to use Control Panel--> System--> Advanced--> Performance. Click on Settings, then on the Advanced Tab. Click on the Change button at the bottom. Select No paging file on C:, select the larger drive and recreate the paging file with 574MB or more.