How to ghost a drive with Vista on it?

[duritz]

So from what I hear, I have a very difficult task to accomplish.

I have a hard drive that is failing on me. It is an old IDE drive with Windows Vista installed on it. I want to move all data and the OS over to a new drive which was given to me. The new drive is a SATA drive.

Ok the hurdles I have... #1 I hear it is hard to find software that will image Vista. #2 I hear it is hard to ghost from IDE to SATA.

Can anyone point me in the right direction on how to go about this and what software I will need? I want to have everything exactly as it is now but with the new hard drive in place of the old one. I was told by 2 coworkers that I will have to start over and just install vista on the SATA drive but I really do not want to do that I just had to do that last month when I had to format to recover from a virus. Everything is finally back to the way I like it. I would hate to start over again

PS it is Windows Vista Business edition. It is a legit genuine copy as work has a corporate license and asked us to install it on our home PCs to test it before we upgraded our work laptops. Also, it is activated.

 

[stash]

Use Complete PC Backup, built into the OS. It's brain dead easy to use.

I'm not sure how it will work with the change from IDE to SATA. That is normally not an issue at all for Vista, but I'm not sure if a Complete PC Backup will do a hardware detection when you restore it.

 

[duritz]

well i have 30 gigs of data to backup if i do it that way. the sata drive is 40 gigs so i am not sure where to save the 30 gigs to if i have to restore it back to the sata drive :-\

i was hoping for a way to just copy one drive to the other. perhaps i can get my hands on another drive to store the backed up data onto but how would i go about moving the data from that drive to the sata drive?

 

[duritz]

ok i got ahold of a 40 gig ide drive, backed up data to it, so now i have the sata drive and this backup drive hooked up. i tried restoring but vista is not seeing the sata drive so i am trying to find vista drivers for my ecs kt600a and am having no luck this sucks...

 

[duritz]

actually the drive is showing up fine on the vista screen. when i go to load drivers it shows the sata drive clear as day. i can even browse on it and create folders. but when i go to restore the data it says i do not have a big enough hard drive for the data i do not get it. it is driving me crazy >_<

exact message
Error Details: There are too few disks on this computer or one or more of the disks is too small. Add or change disks so they match the disks in the backup, and try the restore again. (0x80042401)

it never gives me the option to select the drive i want to restore to. i think it is trying to restore on top of itself. it shows the ide drive as C: and the sata drive as d:

is there any way i can make the sata drive c:??? the ide drive is setup as a primary slave and the sata drive is plugged into the first sata connector. the built in drivers on the motherboard says i can press tab to configure the sata raid but when i go in there it does not let me modify any options (probably because i only have 1 drive so cannot raid it) i would setup a 2nd drive but my power supply only has 1 sata power cable

 

[duritz]

and ok figure i will post what i tried in case anyone else has this issue and searches....

so i booted with just the sata drive and sure enough, it shows as C: now. so what i did was i took an external usb enclosure, put in the ide drive, plugged it in and booted. yay the sata drive is still showing as C: and the external is now E: with my backup data

it reads from the E: drive, i go through the prompts, and bam, same error message... vista + sata = DOOM! i am about to hook up an ide drive and take off the sata drive to see if it will even work that way. if so then vista is just screwed up and i will have to find another way to ghost this drive :'(

/edit/ ok i said screw sata... i hooked up an ide drive... tried to do the recover... same freakin error. cmon someone has got to know how to do this

 

[Navid]

I do not have an answer for you.
But, this thread may be relevant.
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...&STARTPAGE=1&FTVAR_FORUMVIEWTMP=Linear

 

[duritz]

thanks but that link brings me to an empty page

edit/ ok i tried again and it worked. i am gonna try that acronis software since they have a free trial.. wish me luck

 

[Navid]

Originally posted by: duritz
thanks but that link brings me to an empty page

edit/ ok i tried again and it worked. i am gonna try that acronis software since they have a free trial.. wish me luck

Acronis works.
But, you cannot run the free trial version from CD.
I have tried it from Windows. I had Vista on a partition and XP on another. I installed Acronis on the XP partition and ran it and imaged the Vista partition.

 

[duritz]

oh well. thanks for the help but while trying to copy data with that ghost program the drive failed and now windows will not even boot if that drive is attached. i am just starting from scratch -sigh-