Got a question...how can I copy the registry from one hard drive and install it on another so I can just copy all my programs/files onto the new hard drive?
And, where the heck is it? in System32?

I am installing a 60 gig hard drive on the laptop replacing a winnie 20 gig one.

I would just Ghost the drive and copy the image to the new drive.

ditto. do it all the time.

oh great, I have to catch a Ghost and drive it where?

I am a Mac person so you are speaking Greek to me.
Please explain in detail so I can get this freakin laptop workin with all my programs installed.
Mucho thanks

Copying the registry like that won't work anyway. Many, many DLL's won't get registered and services won't start. It will be fubar on the first re-boot I bet. You are just asking for a major disaster down the road. Seeing it's a laptop it is harder to "Ghost" without a 2.5in drive caddy, you could do it via CD's but that is assuming you have Ghost and a CD burner. The best advice I can give is.....now is a good time for a clean install of all your programs anyway. Every version of Windows needs to be re-loaded every so often. You will see improved performance and the better possibility your laptop won't leave you hanging in the near future. Sounds like a pain but the reward will be far greater if you re-load it fresh. My staff and I maintain 3000+ machines and 50+ servers. I re-load machines on a daily basis. If you have "Ghost" or the like program re-load windows fresh and all of your apps. Snap the image and then migrate all your data. Then when you have problems in the future you can have your laptop up and running fresh in minutes not hours.

My 2 cents

Luke D

OK, so I assume you are not trying to move programs from your MAC to your Windows Laptop? Or do you have a MAC laptop and want a bigger hard drive?

Got a 2.5 inch caddy for the ole 20 gig drive. Problem is that I don't have and can't find some of the damn program CD's as we have been remodeling.
Its a Dell latitude 400 laptop that they replaced damn near everything on cuz it sh*t canned about 3 weeks ago. lucky is was still under warrenty.

Never mind, System 32 is Windows.

You will have to load your software all over again. I hope you have a CD burner on your laptop otherwise you will need to take it to someone. Burn all your data (MyDocs, Outlook) whatever you want to save minus the actuall software. Burn to disc, install the new hard drive, install Windows from your restore CD, install software, insert backup disc and put everything back. If you cannot afford to lose your data then I would leave it to a local teenage professional LOL

LukeD

Well, what you want to do is damn near impossible to do typing on this thread. It's pretty complicated. If you can get your hands on Norton CleanSweep then you might be able to do it. Just out of curiousity what software did you lose the CD's for?

all the data is on the 20 gig drive and I want to transfer the files and programs to the 60 gig new drive. New clean install on the 60 gig drive by Dell

I have Norton Clean Sweep.

Lost the discs for Microsoft Map point for one...

If you have clean sweep as part of the Norton suite then you should have ghost as well. IF you have ghost you want to do a "Disk to Disk Image"

Is that the case?

Geoff, do you know anyone local who works in IT? They could probably ghost one drive to another in less than an hour.

Does that caddy you have allow both drives to be installed in the laptop at the same time? If so, that makes it really easy. You would just need a Dos boot disk and the ghost.exe application.

Yes, that sounds like it so I'll look on Clean Sweep
Yes, I know a IT guy but he just flew to NY for the week.

Definately use ghost, registry swap will not work. Ghost is by symantec.com, you use to be able to download a free copy some time ago. At any rate, set your 60 gig drive as slave to your 20gig master, use a boot disk and run ghost, disk to disk and it should span out to the full size of your new drive once completed. Then change jumpers on your drives and that should do it, you can remove your old drive or clean it out and use it as a 2nd storage spot.

Just "borrow" a ghost floppy... It's not like you install it or anything, it's like borrowing a music cd. Just return it when you are done.

If'n ya need one, I could email it to you. It's a really simple deal. We use it daily at work to maintain our fleet of NT crap.

okay - is there a product that can do this from some company less evil than Symentec?

the laptop (the one with the failing disk drive - yes - it must be an epidemic...) came installed with NAV and some other Norton cr*p and it was harder to get rid of than the last few viruses i've had to deal with!

if i *do* have to use Ghost, can i at least install it WITHOUT LiveUpdate? purging that was the worst of the nightmare because it flat lied to me...

it *does* have a DVD writer and i have less than 9GB of stuff to transfer so in theory - if i can burn a DVD before the friggen drive goes Tango Uniform again - i shoud be okay. can it Ghost to a network drive? i've got 250G free on the fileserver...

Why dont you just ghost it to a server over a network connection, I do it all the time. I am sending you a PM.

Ghost is on a floppy disk, you just boot to it and tell it to copy an image to a destination disk. The source can be from anywhere, though copying from one disk to another is one of the options and easy as hell. Ghost is actually the only Norton product that I like, and works VERY well.

QUOTE (ArtechnikA @ May 9 2005, 08:59 PM)

okay - is there a product that can do this from some company less evil than Symentec? the laptop (the one with the failing disk drive - yes - it must be an epidemic...) came installed with NAV and some other Norton cr*p and it was harder to get rid of than the last few viruses i've had to deal with! if i *do* have to use Ghost, can i at least install it WITHOUT LiveUpdate?  purging that was the worst of the nightmare because it flat lied to me... it *does* have a DVD writer and i have less than 9GB of stuff to transfer so in theory - if i can burn a DVD before the friggen drive goes Tango Uniform again - i shoud be okay.  can it Ghost to a network drive?  i've got 250G free on the fileserver...

Wow! This thread is everywhere. Times like these I'm glad I do Unix support.



Geoff,

You can ghost to another network client. Sounds like the way to go. When you get it all rebuilt, partition off a sepereate data drive. Then get a fresh snap with Ghost of your OS partition, then ghost your data partition. You can then occasionally update the partition images. Kinda like a backup.


Rich,

Yes. But it will take a little work on your part.

http://www.sysresccd.org/

Geoff,
Please see PM.

Since you have a drive caddy... XCOPY source destination /E /H /O

Then swap drives and boot. Shouldn't this work? At least something like that worked for me a year or two ago when I changed drives in my desktop.

Geoff, lemme know if you need some help. If you can drop your laptop downtown, I can add it to the stack I have to rebuild!
Desktop support is like the Mafia, everytime you think yer out, THEY DRAG YOU BACK IN!

QUOTE (Gint @ May 9 2005, 11:38 PM)

...it will take a little work on your part. http://www.sysresccd.org/

i can still find my way around in *nix even though i've been away for a long time, but even though i downloaded that stuff, made the cd, and read all the documentation, i was still never able to get anywhere with that stuff. for one thing, NONE of my USB devices worked, so i had to go get a wired keyboard even to get past the boot sequence, then the USB port where i'd plugged the drive in question didn't seem to be there.

i'm sure there are magick incantations to turn all that stuff on but i was just interested in results (this time) not a trip into Operating Systems 101...

so i went back to the CompUSA to buy Ghost (if i had to...) and found "Acronis True Image" for less with the notation that a "recent" PC Mag review preferred it to Ghost. got off to an inauspicious start, with undocumented exceptions and internal failures. downloaded the product updates, tried a less ambitious set of command options and -- it worked just fine. copied off an image, swapped drives, restored an image, plugged the new imaged drive into the HP, hit the switch and watched it boot. success.

so - i can qualifiedly recommend "Acronis True Image" for doing this kind of thing for people (such as myself) who really prefer to avoid any Symantec stuff. and it was cheaper. CompUSA was really pushing the Ghost/PartitionMagic bundle, but by looking around i was able to find it separate -- didn't need it tho.

i bought both the CompUSA brand USB 2.0 aluminum enclosure and the ribbon-cable adapter. i tried the USB first because i preferred to avoid opening the case; it worked fine. now that i have a backup image, i may try using the 80G "flaky" drive as a temp volume in the Compaq "game" machine - i think it may just have got heat-sensitive in the HP - there's plenty of ventilation in the CPQ case, and the drive itself (a Toshiba) functioned just fine in "external" mode during the imaging process.

Hmmm. I just did this on a work PC Friday. You install the larger drive into the pc, format it, installed a temporary basic version of Windows on new drive(probably didn't need to do that but works good for other stuff), boot up to the new temp OS, run the built in XCOPY.exe program to transfer everything from old drive to new drive.

Now comes the hard part...I guess, add a line in the boot.ini file on the new drive so you can boot into both the temp OS you just created and the newly copied old OS, this is for just in case. Then change the mounted device settings of the drives in the registry so your new drive becomes C: and your old drive becomes something else.

It's fairly quick and free.

QUOTE (RustyWa @ May 23 2005, 10:27 PM)

...run the built in XCOPY.exe program to transfer everything from old drive to new drive.

this assumes that you have a computer - unlike most notebooks - where you can install two drives at once...

and i've done my share of time in REGEDIT but most nontrivial installations of XP have thousands of registry entries and it's no fun trying to find and fix all the drive references - although i'll acknowledge it's technically possible...

QUOTE

this assumes that you have a computer - unlike most notebooks - where you can install two drives at once...

I'll give you that one

QUOTE

and i've done my share of time in REGEDIT but most nontrivial installations of XP have thousands of registry entries and it's no fun trying to find and fix all the drive references - although i'll acknowledge it's technically possible...

If you keep the drives the same, C: stays C:, you only have to change it in one place not thousands. HLKM\SYSTEM\MountedDevices\DosDevices\

But like you said, if you only have one drive slot, can't do it the way I described.

Randy caked walked me thru the Favorites transfer so now I have all my 914 sites back on the Dell laptop. I have been transfering some file via the lan as the old hard drive is in a drive caddy and running off the desktop.

Woohoo. Favorites in the house.
Now about that fresh air blower... [Hijack city.]... Can't wiggle that thing outta there for nothin. Maybe I'll break down and remove the gas tank after all.

Y'all do things the hard way.

If you are just replacing the hard drive, this is the easiest way.

Run NTBACKUP, and backup the contents of the hard drive and the system state to disk.

Burn the backup file to a CD.

Install the new hard drive.

Load a basic install of Windows XP onto the system. Don't load ANY extras.

After it's up and running, run NTBACKUP and do a restore of the hard drive and the system state.

Reboot.

You are now up and running with your system identical to the way it was before the hard drive upgrade.

Ya but....there was some goofy problem on the old disc so we decided not to do a copy to the new HD as that would start me down the problems path again.

Running NTBACKUP is not copying the disk. It is the same procedure that is used to backup servers to tape. You would just be writing it to a file on a CD instead.

Glad you got it running

QUOTE

Yes, I know a IT guy but he just flew to NY for the week.

QUOTE

Desktop support is like the Mafia, everytime you think yer out, THEY DRAG YOU BACK IN!