Swapping hard drives

[Starrx05]

I need some suggestions in swapping hard drives of two laptops. First one has a 100GB. This one is slower so not many programs installed. Second one has only 80GB on it but I'm planning to put lots of programs on it because it's faster with more RAM. Both drives are SATA so they should fit. What would be best way to swap them if I don't want to format and reinstall everything? I have several ext. USB drives and both laptops have option to boot into USB in their BIOS?

I'm thinking about using Norton Ghost to make image of each drive on my ext USB drive and restore it back on the other laptop. Will Windows XP detect it has a different hard drive fine this way when booting up? The 100GB drive only has about 20GB on it right now. Any other ideas are welcomed. Thanks.

 

[Starrx05]

No one has any other ideas? I guess I just have to try to find out myself.

 

[corkyg]

What do you mean by swap? Do you intend to put the HDD from Machine 1 in Machine 2 and vice versa? Or, are you simply replacing each in the machine it comes from?

If the former, I would image one of the drives to an extarnal. Then I would clone the remaining drive to the one that is backed up by an image.

The cloned drive should then be immediately bootable in its new home. I would then format the remaining drive and restore the image of the first one to it. Whether or not it boots depends on how good the imaging software was.

 

[Starrx05]

Yes, I meant swiching drives between 2 laptops. I used Ghost once to upgrade HD in my desktop, copying the old smaller drive into a bigger newer drive. It booted up into WinXP fine but then started giving some system errors in popup windows. I think I try with my desktop again first, since I have few empty desktop drives laying around. The old Ghost version has an option to make a complete image of your drive, a .GHO file, then you boot into CD and clone it back. I also have Partition Magic to resize the partitions if necessary.

 

[corkyg]

A proper clone job requires no restoration. It is a bit by bit duplicate drive - ready to go when the cloning is finished. Most HDD OEMs provide such software free as downloads.

And the best advice I can give is use it from bootable media - don't do it from within Windows.