Hard disk drive cloning

It is always easier to clone hard disk running on Windows 98/ME and prior version as it is formatted eithier on FAT16 or FAT32 only.

In fact if you really need to backup and then dump a copy of it on another drive but lacks the disk space required, you could even zipped it up using Winzip in a compressed file and then unzip it later at your convenience.

This would be quite hassle free provided you also zip all hidden and system files in the partition.

Things gets harder with NTFS file system that comes with Windows NT and you will probably need a more commercialised software like Norton Ghost or other cloning wares.

But even with Ghost Personal Edition, you cannot clone Windows XP properly. It tends to fail with an error message about some missing information.

For the budget tight, Maxblast Plus II is a real life saver as it can clone and resize the NT5 partition to fit into your new drive. Only hassle is the check disk run when you restart on the new drive which you should let it run to fix the error on partition size. After that the OS should be thoroughly transferred over to the new drive.

This utility is provided free for Maxtors' customers and it can be downloaded from Maxtor's website. The good thing about this utility is that it doesn't check the drives to be cloned to ensure that it is cloned to or from an existing Maxtor disk.

However, good things always come to an end real soon. The new version of Maxblast from Maxtor's website doesn't allow cloning of non-Maxtor drives plus it isn't anyway better than the original Maxblast II software.

The old version is the one that I would recommend if you want to duplicate an existing version of Windows XP from a faulty drive to a new one. A search on google for Maxblast II download should yield some results.

Additional information: If you get an error when you logon "Low virtual memory. Your system has no paging file or paging file is too small", just boot up with a Windows 98 startup disk with your cloned drive attached and then type "FDISK /MBR" at the DOS prompt. This usually happens when you have already formatted the new drive before cloning and then deleted it for cloning. Or you restarted the computer with both the original drive and cloned drive attached. Or go to Microsoft site and search for KB249321 which consists of some other options for correcting this issue.

Visitor Feedback: I created a clone with Maxblast 4 and ended up with the problem with "Paging File missing or too small or missing." And the boot would just loop from Login back to Login, so I could not modify the page file settings. I didn't have a bootable Win98 CD handy, but from your tip on the Win98 boot I tried another route Rebooting , using the bootable Maxblast 4 CD (from their downloadable boot CD image) From Main Menu I selected "Maintenance Options" I performed the "Update MBR Boot Code" on the newly imaged disk/ This worked fine. K. Turner Waterloo, ON, CA