Exact copy of hardrive to another hardrive.

[paruhd0x]

Is there ANY way of transfering EVERYTHING over to my other hardrive so I don't have to format and reinstall my OS to get on my faster hardrive? Thanks.

 

[kd7fhd]

Norton Ghost

You can get a 15 day trial version at:

CNET Shareware

 

[PliotronX]

I second the Ghost suggestion

The reason why it kicks major ass is it copies down to the sectors stored on the HD.

 

[Wuming]

does it mean with norton ghost i can copy my current OS onto a new hdd, and use that new hdd to boot without any problems, saving all the hassle of reinstalling the OS and drivers on the new hdd?

 

[AgentGuy]

Wuming: Exactly.

You can also use Norton Ghost to save you HDD or partition image to a supported CDRW drive.

 

[dougjnn]

Yes. that is exactly why people love Norton Ghost so much. Great for 1) moving to a bigger HDD in the same system; cloning your setup to identical or nearly identical systems (assuming you have bought the necessary licenses of course.)

Two things though. Make sure that the jumpers, cable position on the new drive you ghosted to are set to be primary, not slave, when you want to boot off of it.

Second, you have to set the disk up as a primary bootable disk in Fdisk. I BELIEVE you can do this after the fact, without destroying data. But it would be wise to do it before the fact the first time, since I haven't done it in a while.

If you want to clone your setup to a signficantly different bunch of hardware, it is more complicated. If the hardware is radically different, it would be wise to simply reinstall everything, and ghost or otherwise copy over the data files only.

If the systems aren't that radically different, if SHOULD/MIGHT work to try this:

1) ghost to the new HDD, after it has been FDISHED as having a boot partition.

2) switch cables to boot from the new HDD on the old computer;

3) go into My computer (right click) device manager and delete all the hardware which is different on the new computer. Don't delete the HDD stuff, it's booting ok on that. Don't delete any more of the basic system stuff than is necessary (this is the edge of my knowledge, e.g. if you are changing basic mobo chipsets. I'd got light here and hope for the best. If it didn't work I'd put the drive back in the old computer, boot again with stuff disabled, let it find stuff, and then delete more basic stuff.) Actually I think the right answer I saw someplace around here was to delete everything EXCEPT X, when it a major system change. What's X???

4) fire the new HDD up in the new system, with your OS CD at the ready, and any driver CD's, floppy download updates, for your new hardware. Let it find all sorts of hardware. For the first pass, have as little hardware in/attached as possible. Only video card perhaps. Then add sound card the next boot, etc. Finally plug in your printer.

5) If you are lucky, plug and play will pull it through for you.

 

[Anubix]

Tips of the trade:

I loaded my machine, one partition for the system C: and the rest on different partitions. I then used Norton Ghost to create recovery disks of the HDD. First with Office, then with games, next development environments. This month I'm in the mood for playing, I recover the games CD. Next month I need to work on VB, I recover the development CD I make an image every month or so and if my machine dies, I can recover it easy. It helps on HDD space management. Everyhitng that needs to be saved I put in CDRWs or zips (saved games, bookmarks, address book). My PC is like a dummy terminal.

 

[Ewu]

Or another alternative is to use drive copy. It does what it says..., just two days ago I move all the contents of my old 13 gig to my new 30 gig. I would've used ghost, but my version did not support ntfs. In addition, I already had three OS's installed on three different partitions and I didn't want to go through the hassle of imaging each partition. So basically I took the lazy way out and just popped the floppies made by the drive copy program, select which partitions to copy and let the program do it's work, while I took a nice nap. It took just a little over an hour to copy around 13 gigs worth of stuff for me.

 

[dougjnn]

Do you know if drive copy works to backup a 90gig with say five partitions to a 30 giger -- if the 90 only has say 15gigs of data on it at the time?

Does Ghost work for that, anybody?

Also which version of ghost do you have that doesn't support Win2k's ntfs? I'm wondering if the 6.0 home version which I got with the Deluxe Systemworks 2000 will work for that. Cause I'm gonna need to back up a drive with some fat32 and mostly ntfs 90g to 30g.

 

[overmars]

To follow up with Ewu, another alternative along with Drive Copy is ImageCast IC3. Same functions, same type of program. There's a freeware/demo version available: freeware IC3

software info

Some people have said it's a bit confusing, but I haven't had any problems with it.

marc

 

[fargus]

If the disk you are copying already contains a bootable partition, you don't have to fdisk the new one at all.