How to move or copy windows installation to new Hard drive ?

HI

I have brought a new bigger hdd and I do not want to install new windows xp on new hard drive. Is it possible that I move my current installation to new bigger hdd?
Is there any way to do it ?
Is there any data loss chances ?

Creating a good backup of your computer system involves not only backing up all of your data, but also backing up Windows and all system files when they are in a working and stable state. When a hard drive crashes or the Windows operating system becomes corrupt, it would be preferable to not only be able to load back your data quickly, but also to load back the entire operating system with all of your user settings, bookmarks, installed drivers, installed applications, and more.
A good way to have both things taken care of at once is to create an image of your hard drive. By creating an image, your entire system state, including the OS and data files, are captured like a snapshot and can be reloaded at any time. It’s the best way to protect your data and also the easiest, since you don’t have to manually copy data from various locations on the system.

DriveImage XML is a completely free data recovery program that you can use to create images and backups of logical drives and Windows partitions. Here are a couple of the major features of this program:

Quickly backup logical drives and Windows partitions to image files without having to restart Windows (you can remain logged in)

Easily browse, view or extract files from the images

Restore the images to the same drive or to a different drive

Copy data directly from drive to drive

Schedule automatic backups and image creations with Task Scheduler


The nice thing about DriveImage XML is that it uses Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Service (VSS), which means you can create hot images of hard drives that are in use. It supports Windows XP, Windows Media Center, and Windows Server 2003. Another good feature is that the images are stored in XML files, which means you can process them in 3rd party tools, not just DriveImage XML.

Create a backup image of your hard drive
Once you have it installed, go ahead and click the Backup button the the left hand side menu to get started. Choose the drives you want to backup and then click Next.



Then go ahead and choose the different options you would like for your backup. Raw mode means that the backup will be the exact size of your drive because free or empty space is backed up also. You can leave this unchecked for most purposes. Compressed means that the file will be reduced in size, but will take a longer time to create the image. You can leave everything else at the default settings.



Also, go ahead and choose a location for the image file. Make sure you put the image on a drive other than the one you are backing up. So if you’re backing up the C drive, put the image on the D drive or on an external drive.

Now your image file will be created depending on the speed of your computer. Once completed, you’ll get two files, an XML file, which is a list of all of the files and a .dat file, which holds all of the actual data.

Restore a backup hard drive image
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. You cannot restore to a smaller partition size than the original.

When you restore, you cannot restore to the same drive you’re currently running Windows on. So you’ll have to use another disk as a secondary disk and then restore the image to that disk. Once restored, you can plug that disk back into the computer that crashed. You’ll basically need another computer running the DriveImage XML software working in order to restore the data.

Also, DriveImage XML does not perform incremental backups after the first backup image, so you’ll either have to have a lot of space or you will have to delete older ones.

Overall, it’s an easy way to “ghost” your hard drive and not have to pay anything! The software works very well and has a simple to use and attractive interface. Enjoy! Source via LifeHacker

I will try DriveImage XML and will post my experience here.