best cloning method?

I'm beyond aggravated. I've upgraged dozens of hard drives in the past
using the floppy to format the new drive and copy the original drive
over to the new one. Apparently the days of simplicity are over. I
tried using the Maxtor Maxblast software since the new drive is a
Maxtor 80g ata133 7200rpm (the old is a 28g Western Digital.) Maxtor
says to use the Windows based version of the program. In the oldern
days there was no such thing, and for good reason - if any files are in
use in your Windows session, how will you be able to copy them to the
new drive sucessfully? This results in failed attempt number one,
since when I reboot all the Norton software on the system is messed up.
Systemworks 2006 needs to be reactivated. Antivirus 2006 shows that
it's running in the system tray, but the system checker thing says that
no antivirus software is present. Blah, blah, blah - bottom line - it
didn't work. So I start over and use the DOS version of the software
off of a bootable CD. I format the new drive, but the automatic
process of asking if you want to copy everything over and make the new
drive the boot drive is mysteriously gone. So I manually use the
utility that copies a hard drive partition to move the old drive to the
new. Only the new drive won't boot. Apparently when you format it,
the program sticks some files on the drive depending on what OS you
intend to install later. Maybe this is the cause of the problem now -
I don't know for sure. I give up. I try one more time with the
Windows version, but this time I went into the startup section of
msconfig to disable every single Norton product and then manually
stopped another 4 or 5 Symantec processes in the task manager. Surely
it would work this time. Nope. Identical problem - no antivirus
installed and every attempt to uninstall or reinstall fails miserably.
Is there a nice simple DOS program that I can run that will format the
new drive, copy the old to the new, and make the new drive bootable?
Thanks in advance for any help.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Can I resell XP computers in my consignment shop without COA?
    ... for bad sectors on a hard drive. ... All I can tell you is that a full format does not write zeros to the ... long gone days of MFM hard drives, that was eons ago, and it has nothing ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • Re: conflict of software Nero Recordnow Drivers - or ??
    ... disk package anywhere. ... If Not when Would I format a disk? ... For most normal disc burning projects, music CDs, playable DVDs, Photo CDs, ... I know I did have DLA, On both drives and I was using when asked if I ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)
  • Re: Can XP access a hard drive formated for Win 98?
    ... for sticking to FAT32. ... FORMATTING OF INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL HARD DRIVES. ... Using Windows Explorer I attempted to FAT32 format the external HD. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.newusers)
  • Re: Formatting Hard Drive In Linux
    ... > I need to format the hard drive. ... the second "laying down a file system." ... logical hard drives on one physical hard drive. ...
    (Fedora)
  • Re: reformatting xp
    ... to do a low level format just to delete one partition. ... In order to do a very clean install you may want to download and ... format your primary partition and install XP. ... drives) and i just want to format one of the partitions. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)