Single boot configuration: Moving Windows XP from an old to a new and larger hard drive.
Partition Configuration #3A - New 500GB or larger drive with availableexternal USB hard drive: The new drive will be initially connected as a second hard drive with a single ‘Primary’ partition occupying the entire drive. You will restore the image backup on your external drive to this partition.
Partition Configuration #3B - New 500GB or larger drive, no external USB hard drive available:
The new drive will be initially connected as a second hard drive with 1 ‘Primary’ partition and 1 ‘Extended’ partition with a single logical drive. The Primary partition will be used for Windows XP and the logical drive will be used as for storing the image backup of Windows XP and to restore that Image to the new drive.
The first partition: The Windows XP Partition should be at least 50% greater than the amount of “used space” on your existing Windows XP hard drive up to maximum of 300GB in size for a 500GB replacement drive. This will give XP some room to grow if needed. For larger replacement hard drives the first partition can be increased so long as you leave enough “Unallocated” space for creating an extended partition large enough to hold at least one image backup (preferably enough space to hold two fully image backups) of your old drive.
Extended partition: After creating the Primary partition, the remaining “Unallocated” space will be used to create an ‘Extended’ partition. After creating the extended partition you need to create a logical drive.
The logical drive: This will be used to store the image backup of the Windows XP partition currently on the old drive.
Image backups usually employ file compression. If the “used” space on your old drive is 120GB the compressed image file could be as small as 90GB or less. Therefore this logical drive only needs to be equal to the “Used” space on your Windows XP partition to insure the image will fit. If you plan to create a second image backup (after Windows XP is installed) then double the space allocated for the Extended partition/Logical drive.
Example: Your old drive is 250GB in size of which 200GB is used. You purchased a 640GB hard drive. Allow 200GB for the creation of an image backup. Create a 400GB Primary partition; this will leave approximately 200GB unallocated (Decimal value) and available drive space for creating the “Extended” partition and a logical drive.Expecting that the compressed image backup file of your old hard drive will be about 150GB in size this leaves about 50GB unused. Note: not all files compress very well so the resultant image backup could be larger than 150GB which is why there is an extra 50GB safety factor.
For larger replacement drives you can create a larger extended partition which would allow for storing more than one image backup.