XP Mysteries Part 1

This is the first in a series of posts about weird Windows XP stuff that I never could figure out - occasionally with explanations, workarounds or solutions.

The first item I'd like to mention is why copying your Windows installation from one disk to another is always so problematic. Why is it I apparently need to by some expensive sector by sector disk copying program to do this? And why is it that even they fail when your source and destination disks are different sizes?

Before I knew better I would use Acronis MigrateEasy to copy stuff - it is a sector by sector disk copier, cost $$, could handle different sized source and destination disks but would often fail if you copying to or from an external (USB/Firewire) drive and it didn't recognize it.

Once I got into Linux the solution that I used until recently was use a wonderful standalone bootable Linux image called 'GParted LiveCD'. It not only copies partitions from one place to another, it could do crazy stuff like move and resize NTFS partitions. Another bonus is it is completely free and is fast.

Then I recently came across, by accident, a wonderful Windows utility called XXClone that achieves the seemingly impossible - copies your C: drive from one place to another and makes that other place bootable. And you can run it while you're running Windows and it works - or it least it has for me so far. Because it does a file by file copy it is oblivious to differences in disk sizes - so long as the target has as much space as the source, and as a side effect it defrags your disk - something that might normally take Windows as long or longer than the entire XXClone disk copy. Finally if you want to hand over $40 then you can get the non-free version that does incremental copy and scheduled copy - basically a backup. This gives you a "hot" copy of your system disk you can boot from if the first goes bad. Yes, there will be some limitations with open files (because it doesn't use volume shadow copy), loss of system restore info - but in my experience 90% of the time, if not more for home and most desktop system use, that is irrelevant.