Switch two operating systems with two hard drivers?

Question

I have xp on my 160G hard drive and have vista on my 60G drive, is there any way I can switch them around, so my vista will have more space.

Thanks for your distribution

5 star is yours

Answer 1

Assuming you have less than 60G of data on the XP drive, and 80GB free space on the vista drive you could do this...

It's going to take some doing... and some software.

You would have to re-partition the 160 GB drive, say to 2 80 GB partitions.  (Partition magic is a commercial program, you could also download RIP Linux, and use gparted to do this for free.)

Format the 2nd partition on the 160 gig drive, make a "backup image" of the XP drive to the 2nd partition on the 160 GB drive using drive image from Power Quest.

Then use Drive Image to duplicate the vista drive to the first partition of the 160 GB drive.

Use the drive image AGAIN to "restore" the backup image of the XP machine you created on the 2nd partition of the 160GB drive, to the 60 GB drive.

Now, delete the 2nd partition on the 160 GB drive, and use gparted, or partition magic to "expand" the vista install to use the full 160GB of the drive and you're finished.

Total time would probably be about 2 hours of work...

Answer 2

back up your data.

go into the disk management console

use the vista  drive shrink utility this will free up unused disk space that's allocated as a drive eg if your c partition is 60gb but has 30gb free it will make the c partition 40gb and give you 20gb as unused space to play with.

now make a new partition from the free space but rather then give it a drive letter, mount it into a folder that needs more space. works just like Unix. vista will think it has more disk space but really the files are just put on another disk.

Answer 3

As long as you are booted into XP, you can move any vista file you want, and vice versa.

The easiest way to do things is as follows:

I'm going to assume your XP drive is C: and your Vista drive is D:

1.)In XP, make a directory called "newvista" and "newxp" on drive C

2.)Copy everything on the Vista disk into newvista

3.)In Vista, copy everything except the folders "newvista" and "newxp" on drive C into the folder "newxp"

4.)In XP, delete everything on the Vista disk, and copy everything in "newxp" onto that disk

5.)Boot into XP on the other disk

6.)Delete everything except the folders "newvista" and "newxp" on the old XP disk

7.)Copy everything in the "newvista" folder onto the new disk

IF everything worked okay (you might want to back these folders up onto CD too), you can delete the folders "newvista" and "newxp". Everything copied over okay, including your registry.

If you have access to a zip utility, a more reliable way to do things is this

1.)In XP, Zip everything on the Vista disk into an archive called "newvista.zip" on drive C

2.)In Vista, zip everything except "newvista.zip" on drive C into an archive called "newxp.zip" on drive C

3.)In XP, delete everything on the Vista disk, and unzip "newxp.zip" into the old vista disk

4.)Boot into XP on the other disk

5.)Delete everything except "newvista.zip" and "newxp.zip" on the old XP disk

6.)Unzip "newvista.zip" into the old XP disk

If you end up with permissions problems, you can always boot into a linux or dos rescue disk, and use a tool like dolly (http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/CoPs/patagonia... or the linux command dd (be careful with dd)

If you're looking to save disk space, a good way to do it is to take advantage of Vista's new "directory junctions" (they borrowed from Linux a little), to combine things like some of your Program Files folder. To do that,

We're going to go with a folder called "D:\Program Files\Myprogram", and drive C has more space.

1.)In Windows XP, make a folder C:\Program Files\Myprogram

2.)Copy everything in D:\Program Files\Myprogram into C:\Program Files\Myprogram

3.)Delete everything in D:\Program Files\Myprogram

4.)In Windows Vista, open up a command prompt as an administrator

5.)Type in the following commands

D:

cd "Program Files"

rmdir Myprogram

mklink /J Myprogram "C:\Program Files\Myprogram"

6.)Now you can use anything in C:\Program Files\Myprogram just like it was still on D:\Program Files\Myprogram, and it won't be sucking up your disk space :D