Cloning hard drives

[The Stimulator]

Hi,

Thinking about replacing the old 4Gb hard drive on my PC with a 40Gb one that I have acquired from a PC my dad gave me. Obviously I'm going to reformat the drive to start from a totally clean disk, but what I'm hoping to do is clone the old drive (currently C drive) with all its files/programs etc onto the new one, and then run the new one as my C drive.

I was wondering if any IT experts out there had any tips that would help. I can get a copy of Norton Ghost which I guess will let me do it.

Thanks for any advice.

Iain L

 

[Rabbitson]

I'm not an expert in this area but as far as I know if you want to properly clone a disk (so that you can just port the image over and start using it) the source disk and the destination disk have to be the same size, so transferring an image to a larger disk wouldn't work.

It may be possible to do it by cleverly partitioning your new disk so that one of your partitions is the same size as the image disk, but I have never tried this.

Would a more practical solution not be to simply add the new hard disk as a D drive and run them both on the PC?

No imaging required and you can start using the extra space straight away.

HTH,

David

 

[cookie]

i thought it was a straightforward operation with a program like ghost, though i have to say last time i tried it with drive image it would not work 100%.

drive image 7 clone wouldn't boot & another attempt with drive image 02 booted, but system restore would not work (i think that last prob was to do with the drives being different sizes).

 

[richie]

Does the XCOPY Command still work???

 

[BlackBetty]

What operating System and which version of Ghost? The later versions of ghost will allow for a discrepancy in disk size. If it is Win9x (FAT) create a DOS disk and boot disk. Boot from DOS disk and XCOPY. Once complete Boot the PC from a Win9x boot disk and and choose "S" (system) to set boot up partition. Use Disk to Disk feature of Ghost for NTFS (NT /Win2k / XP).

 

[(RIP) Yosi]

The way I solved a similar situation, and after trying with diferent soft propositions with no sucess, is to mount the new HD as master, loaded OS and then configurated the old one as a slave. After the OS was loaded, just copied the content of the old one into the new one...
Simple. And you can delete all from the old one and could be used for MP3, images, etc...

 

[Fanum]

Yup, do it like Yosi said......but you can make the process even easier if you're using XP.......use the files and settings tyransfer wizard, get it to set up a'files AND settings' backup from the old drive then import that onto the new 40gb HD once you've installed XP on it.

FWIW, if you clone your old drive, you'll also clone all the things that make it slower than it should be and certainly slower than a fresh installation of windows......I reinstal windows at minimum every six months and it runs noticeably faster, even with the defragging, registry cleanups and proper maintenence I give the system.

All you need to do to set up the new drive on the PC is change the jumpersd on the back of the old one to 'slave', and on the new one to 'master with slave' and put them in the correct places on the IDE ribbon.

HTH

 

[shugie]

I use the disk manager from http://www.paragon-gmbh.com/n_fm.htm

I think it will do what you want - it does a lot more as well, and is not that expensive.

 

[Jimb]

Both Ghost and Drive Image 2002 will clone a HDD of any size to any size, check the options and set the redistribute free space to Auto, I do it all the time on Gold build HDD's , both progerammes require you to create a create & recovery programme on FDD so make sure the source & destination disks are available on the IDE buss, if on an external buss ( SCSI or FIREWIRE ) the recovery process will not see the disk.

 

[The Stimulator]

Thanks for the help guys - 2nd hard drive now fitted and working (and both will stay in machine).



Iain L