Ghosting to avoid re-install ?

[Sword]

Hi,

I would like to ghost or made an exact copy of my boot HDD to a SATA brand new HDD in order to avoid re-installation of my WinXP. Is it possible ?

I already know I might have at least 2 issues :
1-Since I have no SATA drive installed, I have to make sure that all drivers are properly installed before I proceed.
2-I might need to change my boot.ini file in order to select the good HDD and boot partition since it is not going to be the same.

The first issue is easy to solve I believe, but the second one is not that easy but trial and error might work.

Any other suggestion or comments ?

I would like someone to tell me if it is possible and some other things to look at before I proceed.

Thank you

PS Problem solved, see my last post

 

[sswingle]

I dont think drivers will be an issue. Install it as a secondary drive and boot windows. If you can see the drive, then you are fine as far as that goes. Download the drive utility provided by the drive manufacturer. Most of those you can run, in windows even, and copy your entire boot drive over to a new boot drive. Then you shut down, tell your bios to boot to the SATA instead of the old one, and restart.

 

[Sword]

Hi,

Thank you for your reply.

There is just one thing I am not sure to understand : when you say that I should download the drive utility provided by the drive manufacturer, do you mean a software that would allow me to replace Norton Ghost ?

If the answer is yes than I should understand that it is a very easy process since it will copy the boot information from one drive to the other...

Thank you in advance.

 

[Sword]

Evening bump

 

[corkyg]

All you need to do is proportionally clone the old drive to the new drive. I don't know about Ghost, or drive OEM utilities, but Acronis TrueImage does this extremely well using the bootable CD it creates. In the clone function, you have a source drive and a target drive, and choose proportional mode. The resultant clone will be immediately bootable with no reinstall necessary.

 

[Sword]

Hi all,

I tried the WD drive utility called LifeGuard tools.

It seems pretty easy to do but there is no way to reconfigure the different partition sizes to the new drive. For example, my 80 Gb drive was divided in 5 partitions of different sizes. With LifeGuard, the easy automatic transition tool was creating the partitions on the 320Gb to have the same proportions instead of the same size.

Anyway, what I did was to create myself the partitions in XP and then I used their Disc-to-disc utility to copy the files. It does create a boot partition automatically when both source and destination are primary partitions and when the source is a boot partition.

Still, 1 remaining question :

-How can I switch back the Active partition to my older HDD if the new boot partition on my new HDD fail to reboot ?Am I going to be able to activate the partition using a Win98 boot disk ? Am I going to be able to use the PartitionMagic 8 CD as a bootable disc ?

Thank you again

 

[corkyg]

Originally posted by: Sword
-How can I switch back the Active partition to my older HDD if the new boot partition on my new HDD fail to reboot ? Am I going to be able to activate the partition using a Win98 boot disk ? Am I going to be able to use the PartitionMagic 8 CD as a bootable disc ?

When you clone a drive, you don't necessarily make changes to the original. At that point in time, either drive will boot. They are not normally used at the same time. If the new drive boots, and all is well, THEN you can reformat the old drive from scratch. In my experience, you can always use the PM8 bootable CD.

This is why I like Acronis - all ofthis is done for you simply by making menu choices. I clone my drives in three computers just about every couple of weeks. Every system has a spare (not connected) drive ready to go.

 

[Sword]

Thank you !

I'll look for that software (Acronis) in a near future for sure.

 

[Sword]

Hi all,

Just to give an update.

When using LifeGuard tool make sure to do it in DOS mode OR shutdown the system restauration on all drives.

If you do not do that you will encounter two severe problem :
1-You will not be able to open msconfig anymore
2-You will not be able to do anything with the restauration system since it will crash at opening

I will try to shutdown restauration of my system and to copy the files in windows to see if it is working.

 

[0roo0roo]

just restore image to the sata, unplug the pata and set bios to boot from sata. should work. i think ghost doesn't care about drive size as long as the image fits. you don't need to create a boot partition if the image already was of a boot partition. i dunno about how xp will react to sudden sata drive though, i've only don't image restores to drives of same type so far

 

[Sword]

Hi,

Another update :

I did remove the restauration from my HDDs prior to make the "copy" to the new HDD and now the restauration system can work at the price of losing every restauration point.

The msconfig problem is still unsolved. I will try to solve it since it would allow me to keep my money instead of buying either Ghost or Acronis.

Thank you

 

[Sword]

Hi all,

I have been searching for 2 hours now on google and on Microsoft Knowledge Base without any success.

My problem is quite simple to explain : msconfig is there, I took a fresh copy from my winXP CD, but still when I execute it nothing happen. Conclusion, I cannot use msconfig anymore.

Anyone has a clue on this one ?

Thank you

 

[Sword]

Hi all,

I finally got my answer about msconfig not loading...and it was, as usual, too simple !

My boot.ini file on the new partition was like that :
[boot loader]
timeout=1
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\windows
[operating systems]

I simply add the following line to it after [operating systems] and it did the job !

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP ?dition familiale SATA" /fastdetect

I discovered this while comparing all my .ini files.

I hope it will help some people !