I'm having problems trying to set up a new 120Gb hard drive, with three partitions, in my XP Pro machine.

The plan is to clone my existing 20Gb C drive as the boot partition of the new drive, so that my old system would be transferred to a new drive with two other empty partitions ready for storage.

This method might sound ambitious, but I've carried out similar processes many times before, using Casper XP, a drive cloning utility from the same stable as Drive2Drive (for Win98).  When cloning single partition drives, the process works perfectly, as Casper resizes partitions to fit the available space, in either direction.  

My existing 20Gb drive is about 3 months old.  Both drives are modern Western Digital 7200 rpm models.

First I connected the new drive to the system as a slave and used XP's Disk Management to partition and format it.
Then I created and formatted 3 partitions on the new drive - a primary partition of 8Gb, a second of 10GB and the third partition taking up the balance of 102Gb.  (These sizes are nominal of course - the true size of a 120Gb drive is just over 114Gb)

My existing 20Gb drive has one partition, containing around 5Gb of data (all my other data is stored on two USB drives).  In theory Casper should have been able to resize this partition to fit into the new 8Gb slot - as I said, it only contains 5Gb of data anyway.

However, on this occasion the process isn't working and I'm durned if I can see what's going wrong.

After the copy is complete and I connect the new drive into the box, it begins to boot then says:

"Verifying DMI Pool Data
Boot from CD:

A disk read error has occurred
Use Ctrl\Alt\Delete to restart"

I've repeated the cloning process several times using both Casper and Partition Magic 8 with the same lack of success - I even sent the first 120Gb drive back to the supplier, thinking it was faulty, but the replacement does the same thing.

Obviously, it's my methodology that's at fault, or choice of cloning utility.  Can anyone offer a possible solution?

I guess an option might be to try Ghost to do the cloning.

Or maybe scrub the new disk back to one big 120Gb partition, do the cloning then use Partition Magic to resize the partition to the size I want then create the two additional partitions.

Suggestions would be appreciated.

Ian Porter
Computer Guys Inc.
Arrowtown
New Zealand
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