Restoring across service packs.

Okay. Want to ditch old, slow, probably dying hard drive. It has my XP installation. To prevent having to reinstall everything (+registry conflicts from programs installed on my second drive) I want an easy way to get my old XP install on my new drive.

A few months ago, someone suggested using dd in Linux. That's an option, albeit a seemingly more difficult one - made even more difficult by the fact that I already put a decent bit of stuff on my new drive, and have this feeling that the bit-for-bit data transfer would get rid of a lot of stuff.

So here's my situation, which I can't seem to find an answer to. My current installation is SP1, because SP2 sucks pretty bad. However, all I seem to be able to find is a slipstreamed SP2 install disk. Now, if I use the backup utility from my SP1 installation, and then install cleanly on the new drive with SP2, then use the backup utility to restore from my SP1 backup file, will there be any major problems or conflicts? The only thing I was able to find was someone saying to upgrade to SP2 immediately after doing this, but they didn't give a reason why - I don't know if they said it because it would cause massive system instability, or jsut because they're MS fanboys and are trying to push SP2 on people as much as possible.

I used either Norton Ghost or Partition Magic when I had to do that, probably PM. You may still have to move whatever partition you have on the new drive so that the old one can fit where it was size and position wise.

There's dd for Windows as well, albeit not as robust as in Linux.

Imaging generally requires an entire disk to work, although I'm guessing you can image a partition and restore it to another partition of equal size. Honestly, for something as major as a HDD change, I would just start with a clean install.

Yeah, I've decided that that's going to be my only option.

I spent this afternoon using Partition Magic to clone it, and then even after fixing the boot.ini with the recovery console, it was borked beyond repair. C'est la vie.

You might have forgotton about the HD boot record, or setting the copied partition as active/bootable after making/writing it :p Oh well, bit late now to tell you that :p

The free version of bootit ng is a big help too.
http://www.bootitng.com/bootitng.html

You can use it to safely reorder and resize NTFS partitions that already have data on them.

I would personally suggest backing up only what you needed (Documents, Favorites, music library, saved games, downloaded files, projects, etc...), reformatting and reinstalling SP2 (SP2 has worked just as well as SP1 for me personally) or SP1 cleanly, then copying the config/document/personal files back into place. If you have any programs/games, just reinstall them cleanly as well, then copy your saved games/profiles back into place. It's far easier and cleaner this way than trying to merge a bunch of OS stuff on top of a fresh install.

I also recommend SP2 if you're planning on installing all the critical updates anyway. Getting SP1 secure and up-to-date will require more time and might slow down your system more with individual updates compared to just installing SP2. The only real annoying thing about SP2 is the security center which can easily be disabled.