How to copy your operating system from one hard drive to another

At first sight, this article may look very complicated. I can assure you it is not. Read it through carefully a couple of times, then follow the steps exactly as shown.Recover Data in Udisk

A number of contributors have posted regarding limited-capacity main drives, (i.e. ones containing the operating system but with less than about 40 GB), but who do not want simply to replace the drive with a larger one with all the problems of having to reinstall the operating system and all their programs. For the purposes of this article it is assumed that the operating system drive is the C: drive. One answer is to purchase a second larger drive (they are cheap now) and clone the original C: drive to the new drive (usually D:) or, if users already have a larger D: drive, clone the C: drive to the existing D: drive and make that the boot drive, either by changing the BIOS so that the machine boots from the D: drive, or (the preferred method), changing the drive configuration so that the D: drive becomes the C: drive and vice versa. I found a product called XXCLONE that is published by Pixelab of Naperville, Illinois, USA that is designed to help do what we are trying to achieve here. Pixelab offer a freeware version that allows us to perform the volume-cloning operation we are interested in here. Whilst their Pro version supports various backup modes for repeated operations using an incremental backup for greater efficiency, the freeware version is all we need for now.

To clone your C: drive follow the steps below:

Step 1. If you already have a larger D: drive in use, back up all important information on the drive D: to DVDs, CDs, or floppies as all existing data on the drive will be lost. If installing a new drive, set the jumper(s) to slave (see step 24 below) and format it using the NTFS file system using Start/Control Panel/Administrative Tools/ Computer Management/ Disc Management. If your new drive (or your existing D: drive if you already have one) is very big, you may want to consider partitioning it. For details of how to format and partition a drive see How to format a Hard Drive partion in Windows XPlost data recovery

Step 2. Download and unzip the XXCLONE Freeware package from Pixelab. When you unzip the file, you will find an installation program (named something like xcfwinst_0580.exe) that will unpack all the necessary files.

Step 3. Run xcfwinst_0580.exe from the folder you unzipped to.

Step 4. Run XXClone from Start/All programs/XXClone or the desktop icon.

Step 5. Make sure the source and target volumes are your C: and D: drives respectively. Select the box for Backup the entire volume by copying all the files from scratch. (see the screenshot below)