Friday, March 4, 2011

Migration of XP in IDE drive to SATA in a Dell Optiplex

Moving one XP installation to another drive typically will take several days.  Basically, it is

  1. prepping your old drive
  2. imaging your old drive to the other drive
  3. booting up the other drive
  4. fixing all the problems that come up.
With that in mind, I still thought it would be better to migrate my wife's WinXP home installation to the Optiplex than installing Windows from scratch (which, if I did, would be with Win7) which would require me to source the various software packages that she uses.

This took about 3 days, but it's finally (mostly) working.  Here it is in detail.  Read through it before following the steps, as not all steps are necessary, or you may be able to adjust the steps more efficiently.

  1. Backup your essential info on your IDE drive with your old pc
  2. Download the optiplex network, chipset and display drivers and save it - this will save you time later when you need these drivers but have no network connection with which to get them
  3. Prior to the last time you shut down the source install of Windows, go into the Device Manager and remove the IDE controller.  This step was required for switching to a different IDE controller (or else your machine wouldn't be able to boot past the low-res Windows logo), but I'm not sure if this is necessary anymore since we're moving to SATA.  It doesn't hurt though, since Windows will auto-install the controller on bootup.
  4. Create a UBCD4WIN bootable CD
  5. Move your IDE drive into the Optiplex (which already has a SATA drive)
  6. Ensure that your IDE drive is accessible by pressing F2 at bootup to enter the BIOS setup and making sure the PATA connections are set to ON.  Also make sure you can boot to the CD while you're here.
  7. After booting up UBCD4WIN, use a tool to create partitions that will at least hold the data of your old drive.  I just used the Disk Management tool that comes with Windows (r-click on Windows Explorer and choose Manage).
  8. Run DriveBackupXML to copy your IDE partitions to the SATA partitions.  In my case, my IDE drive was drive 0, and SATA was drive 1, but DriveBackupXML will at least show drive labels to help you confirm this.
  9. Go back into the Disk Management Tool of step 6 to set the main partition as Active.
  10. Shut down your computer, and disconnect your IDE drive.
  11. Boot up, making sure that your are booting up to your SATA drive and not your cdrom drive (in case your UBCD4WIN is still in the drive)
  12. See how far Windows gets in its bootup. (once Windows can boot up, you can put your old IDE drive back into your old machine, in case you still need it to access the internet and look up problems)
  13. If you are able to see the mouse cursor, then you know that the drive is accessible through Windows.  If not, boot back into UBCD4WIN and run FIX_HDC.  Then try booting back into Windows.
  14. In my case, it seemed everything was working except for mouse and keyboard.  Normally, those would autodetect properly.  However, the network drivers weren't installed for the onboard ethernet, and its Yes/No dialog  prevented any further drivers from being installed. There is no way to install drivers from within a UBCD4WIN environment, nor is there a way to do it from the Recovery Console. My only recourse was to do a repair, also known as an in-place upgrade: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/978788 . Note that you'll need your original XP install CD to do this.  I had made an XP SP3 slipstreamed CD a few yrs back, so this did the trick...sorta.
  15. While I was now able to use the mouse and keyboard, there were a few new problems:
    1. the Network Connections showing up no connections despite the network adapter drivers having been installed correctly (as reported in Device Manager).  I followed all the steps here, to no avail: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/825826
    2. The second issue was that ATI Control Centre (which I no longer needed in the optiplex) which ran on startup was complaining that it didn't have security settings to change anything. "You Do Not Have Permission to Change The Catalyst Control Centre Settings"
    3. The third issue was that running any sort of installer (such as the drivers) would display an error that Windows Installer wasn't working.
  16. My SP3 slipstream cd has always given me some amount of trouble, so I thought I'd try my RTM copy of WinXP for the repair.  After repairing for an hour, the results were even worse, as upon bootup, the mouse cursor would appear momentarily, a messagebox would appear for a brief instant, then the machine would immediately reboot.  After trying this several times, I finally got a glimpse of the error - something about the virtual memory.  Having never seen that before, and also not too excited to debug a problem for which there isn't a clear error message, I returned back to the SP3 slipstream repair.
  17. I tried addressing each problem in #15 individually, but no solution seemed to work.  Eventually, I took a look in the event viewer and looked up an error message, which pointed me to this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/909444 and http://support.microsoft.com/kb/916254. Bingo!  A single problem which describes all the symptoms I was seeing.  To change security permissions on XP home folders, you need to boot into Safe Mode, then turn off Simple File Sharing.  I didn't end up acting on the second KB article, but include it for reference.
  18. I rebooted into normal mode, and finally, all of those symptoms disappeared, revealing new problems.  Since the repair moved my IE back about 8 years to IE6, a lot of dependent services were failing.  I downloaded and installed IE8.
  19. My wireless network adapter would occasionally crash.  I figured that my base install sans Windows Updates has a little to do with that.  I proceeded to run a Windows Update. However, IE would enter its "not responding" state as soon as I tried to download the ActiveX control.  I booted up into Safe Mode, and tried again.  This time, the ActiveX control installed, but Windows Update then gave me the 8007043C error, indicating that Windows Update can't run in Safe Mode.  I booted back into normal mode, and Windows Update then worked.
  20. Windows Update will barf when it tries to install IE8 again, causing all subsequent steps to fail. You'll need to choose Advanced and unselect the IE8 install to get the rest of the updates installed.  Later on, you'll be able to tell Windows Update to ignore the IE8 install.

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