Right now, I have two hard drives. My C:\ drive has my OS on it (XP Home SP2), and my J:\ drive has nothing on it (a few gigs used, but nothing is showing in windows explorer. I suspect it is from partitioning and stuff), and I can put files on my J:\ drive.

My plan is to eventually have what is on my C:\ drive on my J:\ drive and have Linux installed on my C:\ drive. The problem is that if I just copy the contents of my C:\ drive over my my J:\ drive, the Windows registry files and all of the stuff in the OS will refer to files located on my C:\ drive, so I won't be able to run XP off of my J:\ drive (or boot off of it). My goal is to be able to boot off of J:\ and be able to run Windows so everything would be identical to how it is now (on my C:\ drive) without the help of another hard drive, and be able to boot off of my C:\ drive which would have Linux on it.

What I need is a program that can transfer the operating system and all of my files onto another hard drive, and also changes the registry and everything so I would be able to start XP off my my J:\ drive alone. That is why I am here. Can you give a link to a program that can do this? It would be much appreciated. Thank you.

(Oh, and right now I have access to Norton Ghost, but I am not sure it would do what I am asking for. Would it?

(And my C:\ drive is getting really full, and my J:\ drive is much larger, so that is why I can't just install Linux on my J:\ drive.)

Hey Waldo,

Welcome to PCHF. We have a wonderful team of techs here, and I feel certain that we will be able to help you figure this out.

My first question is actually a concern that you are not showing the files that you currently have on your J drive. Before attempting any kind of move you should make sure that the drive is fully available to you. If you do not need the files that we over there, I would suggest that you reformat that drive, and make sure that all partitions are available.

My second question is why you don't simply move the files over after installing Windows onto your J drive? That would be the simplest way to handle this. It would also give you the best chance for a clean and successful move.

Looking forward to your reply,

TTFN

LGW

You would be better to use ghost to transfer your windows data to the larger hard drive "j" then set it up in the pc as the master "C" drive then format your old "C" drive and set it as a slave and setup Linux on that much easier that way. How do you plan to configure the mulitboot?

have you seen this method before it's puts both O/S on one hard drive
How to Dual Boot Windows XP and Linux on a Single Hard Disk

P.S make sure the hard drive is ok as LGW suggested

If your's is a SATA drive, try connecting it as a RAID 0 drive. RAID 0 mirrors your data between the drives. Also is RAID 1 and RAID 2. Just a thought...