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Win 7 copy corrupts Win XP filesystem
I have a new laptop, Win 7 Enterprise 64 bit. I have an old laptop Win XP SP3. I wanted to make a complete copy of my old hard drive to my new hard drive, so mounted the old laptop drive in an external USB enclosure and plugged it into the new laptop.
Using Win 7's explorer, I select all the files in the old drive, and copy them to a location in the new drive. Part way through I get the infamous "You need permission from the administrators to **make changes to this file**". The error itself is a whole separate thread, so we'll ignore that. The "making changes to this file"... I put it down initially to a poorly worded dialog box. I made several attempts over the weekend to make Win 7 do the copy, but all failed, including one attempt with the hidden admin account.
This morning I put my XP drive back into my old laptop and part of the XP install was corrupt. Win 7, performing a **read-only** operation, did in fact "make changes to this file". What exactly I'm not sure, but it broke XP. I had to use an OEM XP CD to do a repair.
The symptom was that every menu in XP displayed incorrectly. Start Menu, menu bars, Outlook, all broken.
I've done quite a lot of searching and can't find any discussion on this particular issue. I suspect Win 7's indexing helpfully updating the old hard drive, but am not sure how to prove this.
Update: I did not attempt the "take ownership" fix for the permissions, as I must not alter the old drive in any way.
So the question: how can I make a complete copy of my old XP drive onto my new Win 7 drive, without Win 7 corrupting the XP install?
...Stu
Last edited by Stuart CDS; 17 May 2011 at 13:15. Reason: Clarifying wording