PLEASE HELP!! Making a xp boot disk...........

[sturt007]

PLEASE HELP!! Making a xp boot disk...........

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Hi all,

I have a PackardBell easynote laptop W3301.

Installed on my laptop I have win xp home. When I bought this laptop new it came with xp all pre installed with no disks. I have now bought myself a new upgraded HD to replace old.

I do not want to transfer all data accross from old to new as I would like to add my stuff manually again. So all I want is the existing win xp instalation to be placed onto a bootable cd/dvd.

I would like to have on the boot cd all the stuff that originally came with laptop like all drivers, ATI graffics etc and not just plan old xp.

How do I create a boot disk with my existing xp on it?????



I have tried many ways of doing this. I have two partitions on pc, 1 is unhidden and my main C drive and the other is Backup hidden. I tried following a guide on internet that said to find the files, Boot.ini, NTLDR, Ntdetect.com and a couple more and then burn these files to disk. Prob is that I found the files using Partition Magic 8 but they are in my BACKUP hidden files, (i can see them but can not copy them).


I am very keen to find out how this is done before I go mad.

Any help is much appreciated.


Thanks

[PrntRhd]

I moved from Buying Advice forum to Storage forum since you are asking for a different form of help.

One solution is to make an "Image" of the HDD, using imaging software from several sources:
The new HDD manufacturer utilities such as MaxBlast may allow you to copy the drive contents and load onto the new HDD.
Imaging programs like Symantec Ghost, Acronis TrueImage, and Terrabytes Unlimited's Images for Windows all allow you to make images, test them and then load the image onto the new HDD.

These programs make it possible to restore the entire PC, data, drivers, everything.

Your notebook may also have a hidden Recovery partition, the files needed to restore may be located there but requires your notebook has a burner so a recovery set of disks can be burned. This would be a recovery back to original setup condition, in this method all data would be lost.

[Paul Komski]

It appears that you just want to just migrate to a larger or newer hard disk. Once having done that it's not clear if you want to have a new clean installation (and with all drivers etc, etc) or just carry-on with your current system but on a new hard drive.

I suggest that you first clone your current hard drive to the new one by copying both partitions from one hard drive to the other. If you obtain a 2.5" USB enclosure then BiNG should be able to copy the two partitions across to the new drive in the enclosure. Then swap the hard drives and check that you can boot to the new hard drive.

Having done that successfully you should be able to use BiNG again to resize the original partitions to fit and (if the hidden partition contains restoration images) do a clean reinstallation of the operating system from an image file on the hidden partition if that is what you fancy. You can do all of this in the knowledge that your orignal hard drive is still intact (and available to restitute the situation) and then, once you are ready, you could reformat the old drive and use it for backup purposes in the USB enclosure.

You could also do all these manouevres using image files placed first onto CDs/DVDs and then restoring them later to the new hard drive installed in the laptop. Personally speaking doing a direct disk to disk clone would be preferable IMHO.

PS BiNG should have no problem with seeing and cloning to a USB device but if so an alternative would be to use a Knoppix Live CD to do the partition copying and resizing with its QParted application.

[computerhilfen]

PLEASE HELP!! Making a xp boot disk...........
I do not want to transfer all data accross from old to new as I would like to add my stuff manually again. So all I want is the existing win xp instalation to be placed onto a bootable cd/dvd.

I would like to have on the boot cd all the stuff that originally came with laptop like all drivers, ATI graffics etc and not just plan old xp.


As far as I understood, he DOES NOT want to copy data from hdd 1 to hdd 2, but make a clean install (which is a good plan anyways). But... I never heard of a vendor selling a pre-installed windows without any CDs/DVDs. If PB does that, I'd never buy that again. As far as I know, there is no possibility to make a bootable install/recovery CD out of an existing windows installation including all drivers...

[Paul Komski]

But... I never heard of a vendor selling a pre-installed windows without any CDs/DVDs.
I have seen exactly this situation with a PB iMedia. It had the installation restore facility on image files on a partition on the hard drive. The PC came with a CD-burner and one had the option of burning these files from the hard drive to CDs and to then delete the files on the hard drive to liberate space. If one didnt execute that option one had no way or resintalling onto a new hard drive - as in the current situation. I anticipate that the orignal hard drive has just such restoration files and if that is the case the drive can still be cloned to a new larger drive and a factory reinstall initiated. The original drive would have all the user's data still on it to be used as seen fit.