I have a 75 GB Western Digital Hard Drive as my primary HD, on which I've installed Windows XP. I recently bought a 100 GB Maxtor hard drive, which I'd like to use as my primary hard drive, if I can clone the old onto the new.

The Maxtor came with a "Maxblast" CD that I can boot from and attempt a "Drive to Drive" copy. However, at around 15% into the process, the copy stops with a message indicating that some files from the source drive could not be read/copied and suggested that I run defragmenter & scandisk. I ran both (Scandisk reported NO problems) and retried the copy but get the same message.

My computer doesn't have a floppy, which rules out using the Western Digital software (I've had success with that in the past). Any suggestions on how I can clone my old drive into the new Maxtor drive?

Thanks.

Acronis Trueimage.

Before going nuts - check your BIOS settings for the old drive. You probably have either old BIOS which won't recognize the entire drive, or have it set incorrectly. Booting from the CD, the driver relies on the BIOS's interpretation of the drive's geometry. Normally, Windows XP (or 2k) overrides this. If you can't fix the bios then you need a duplication option which doesn't rely on the bios.

I used a program called "Ghost" to do this. I think Norton owns it now.

EDIT: http://www.symantec.com/sabu/ghost/ghost_personal/

I like Acronis True Image better than ghost.--easier to use--it worked better for me over to a network drive--and it costs less to boot

did you do a low level format on the new drive using that Utility first? Curious if that all works ok?

I did a quick format in Windows XP

If you have some Unix/Linux experience, try using Knoppix or one of the other "live" CD versions of Linux, and use the Unix dd command. Price is right!

Did you use the /r switch when you ran the chkdsk? I've had it happen where a single bad sector will crater a ghosting operation.