Windows 7: Problem cloning XP to bigger drive prior to installing XP/7 dual boot

In preparation for setting up a dual boot XP/7 system on my Lenovo laptop I'm using EaseUS Partition Master initially to clone the existing XP drive to a new larger one prior to creating a new partition (on the new drive) for Windows 7. The new drive is connected via a USB caddy for the copying operation.

However the initial copying progress is so unbelievably slow that I'm now very concerned that it's "stalled" - the progress bars aren't moving at all although there is evident disk activity at least on the new drive. Is this operation normally very slow?

It's now 22:30 here in the UK so I'm gong to bed, leaving the cloning to do it's stuff (I hope!). But what if it's still in the "no progress" state in the morning? I'm concerned that, because the source (C) drive was "locked" prior to starting the copy operation, I may not even be able to access that if I simply shut the PC down and disconnect the caddy.

I realise that this is really an XP issue but I hope someone can help here.

Perhaps with a little luck it will all be done by morning and it will just seem like a bad dream

Regards

John

Just an update - some very slow progress is being made - just 2% in over two hours but at least something is happening. Live in hope!

John

Good news - bad news.

When I came back to the PC the Windows desktop was back up and running, so the original drive is OK. But when I went into Disk Management the target drive (the one in the caddy) was showing a single unallocated partition, evidently the process didn't work. So what on earth was it doing all night?

What have I misunderstood? Is there a more reliable way of cloning drives than the one I've tried to use?

John

Hello John mate try the Macrium I found it much easier to use Macrium Reflect FREE Edition - Information and download

I used to use the EseaUS but with this app you can do whole or part drives too:)

My son (who has used the EaseUS utility successfully many times to do exactly what I am trying to do) also tried to perform this operation on my computer. It failed in exactly the same way for him too. He says that, normally, the copying progress is quite "visible" but in my case, it basically didn't even start - progress bars just don't move. He's as puzzled as me.

Do it from bootable CD! Check source disk and destination disk for errors. And check if they are faulty.

So not knowing what the machine specs are John it is a bit hard to say how fast it will go. So say for instance if I were using my i5 in th e laptop @2.26Ghz I would expect the cloning to take longer than say my Ivy i5 @3.4GHz plus I would expect the RAM might play some part in it.

John

Disk I/O speed is most important that's the bottleneck.

Hum K didn't think of that but now you have mentioned it I winder what the specs are for the machine are even more as in transfer speeds for the board and drives etc

Thanks all. My son took both drives away to clone on his computer. It turned out there were some unreadable (and unrepairable) sectors on the source drive. There had been no evident problems with the computer beforehand and Easeus does a chkdsk automatically before cloning that had found no errors. The source disk is a WD 320GB drive that's only a year old, so it's going back for a return (it itself was a clone of the original 80GB that the computer was supplied with). Fortunately I still have that 80GB drive (and a full backup of the 320GB drive). The 80GB drive is back on board as I speak - found some 66 updates! So I'll clone that - I've done a thorough check of that, including a surface scan, and it's 100% OK.

The computer is a Lenovo 3000N100 with Intel Core Duo processor. It's passed the Windows 7 upgrade advisor with no serious issues and will run 64-bit version. It's quite old though - what's best do you think: 32 or 64 bit?

Many thanks folks.

John