Any reason why I can't simply copy everything from one hard disk to another??

[Napalm]

I have a new 30gb hard disk but I don't feel like taking the time to reinstall everything from scratch - the old hard disk is tweaked just as I want it. In principle, is there any reason why I can't copy over everything from the old hard disk to the new hard disk and have it function correctly??

Cheers,
Napalm

 

[office boy]

Well not copy, because you would mess up the sequence of files, and the position on the drive, but you could ghost it, and that would work nicely...

 

[Hanpan]

Yes.

Known as system files boot sector read only and hidden files.

There was a thread about this a couple of days ago so you may want to do a search.

But you definatly can't just copy all th files. YOu can however use a program like norton ghost to do it.

 

[Napalm]

thx

Napalm

 

[Grminalac]

Hello,
Well what kind of drive did you buy. I know maxtor as well as many other drive manufacturers include utilities that not only format the drive they will also image your new drive with the old.
You just have both drives connected and insert the floppy with the program on it. Your drive should have directions, If not you could probably find the utility at the makers website.

As the other user said before you could always use Norton Ghost to make an image as well.

 

[Ulysses]

Transferring your existing system to a new hard disk drive:

1. There are a number of ways to install a new hard drive and transfer your existing operating system, applications and data from your old drive to the new. Some may prefer to use full-featured imaging utilities such as Norton Ghost or Drive Image, but buying those programs really is not necessary just to install a new drive. All drive manufacturers provide free utilities for installing and configuring new drives. These utilities usually come with the retail versions of new drives, or may be downloaded from the manufacturer?s website.

2. Here are links for downloading drive manufacturers? free drive installation/configuration utilities:
IBM
Maxtor
Quantum
Seagate
Western Digital

3. A PC Magazine article explaining procedures for installing and configuring a new HDD may be found here.

 

[backWERD]

Norton Ghost is my FAV utility for copying an entire disk to another just make sure your drive doesnt have bad sectors it will copy those too

 

[backWERD]

just kidding

 

[Napalm]

Ulysses:

Now that is why I come here...

Napalm

 

[corkyg]

Ghost and Drive Image are costly approaches to a simple problem. Get Drive Copy 3.0 from PowerQuest. You boot with a bootable disk, and it totall clones one drive to another . . . partitions, optimizations . . . everythings. Takes only about 14 minutes to do a 20 gig drive.

I do this every week on two systems . . . 100% redundant backup system. No futzing around with images and restorations. It is simple, direct, effective and cheap. The program costs less than $30.

 

[larrymoencurly]

Sometimes when Fry's has a mobo/CPU combination for sale and the mobo is a Soyo (as they do this week, but it's only a K6-2/333), it comes with a fully working copy of Ghost.

 

[putergeek]

You can now, but Ive heard that next year all the major disk manufacturers plan to implement copy protection, so doing that would be blocked by low-level hardware encryption. What a dumb idea, huh?
They are trying to say that it is only for removables..but from what I have read thats just a smoke-screen.. they are working on changes to the IDE and SCSI specs.. (how many IDE or SCSI removables do you know of?) Hopefully they will realize the insanity of all this and how much chaos it will cause for regular and even corporate computer users, but that hasn't deterred them yet.. Perhaps it can still be stopped, but people need to make their voices heard. My feelings are that people should be able to transfer files without digital signatures, etc.
This technology is also almost sure to make a lot of your old software break...and new software probably wont work with older (read current) computers.. (perhaps that is what they want..)


This is a good example of brain-dead thinking.

You can read about the situation on theregister.com and slashdot.org

 

[Pederv]

This is what I do to copy from an old HD to a new HD and it works.
1) Remove your old HD and set the new one as master
2) Fdisk it as if you were setting up a primary drive (set active partition, etc.)
3) Format the drive, making sure your active partition has the system files on it.
4) Powerdown make your old HD the bootable drive and the new drive as a secondary master or slave .
5) Disable your virtual memory and restart
6) when windows reboots you may get errors on not enough memory, unload as many TSR's as you can get away with to increase memory.
7) Go to Windows Explorer (File Manager), select all, copy and paste to the new hard drive.
8) When it asks if it's ok to over write io.sys say NO, for msdos.sys say YES
9) Powerdown and swap the HD's again, so the new HD is the bootable drive
10) When windows restarts re-enable virtual memory and reboot
11) transfer complete

OOPS!! forgot, make sure that Windows Explorer can see ALL FILES.


Of course this only works with win9X and earlier systems, you'll have to use a third party tool to do NT and 2K.

 

[Lord Evermore]

It is possible to do this using only xcopy32. Certain switches force it to copy all directories, hidden and system files. When done, simply sys.com the new drive, make sure the proper partition is set to active on the new drive, then pull out the old one, set the new one to master, and it's done.

However I'm not going to try and figure out the switches again.

 

[Cosmic_Horror]

go to russ's website and look for a little program that copies partitions over called filecopy...

i have used it a few times and it is great!


russ;'s website

 

[wxman]

Just use filecopy.exe

Used it just last night, copied my C: drive onto another drive so I could make a full system back up before I messed with Win2000 Pro om my 45gig IBM. It works every time. Flawlessly.

Just don't make the drive bootable when it asks.

It runs in windows, in a DOS window.

I'll mail it to you if you need it.

 

[amdskip]

neato info everyone!

 

[Homer]

I'll second that. I have a bunch of this stuff to do at home next week - the old downward shuffling of the parts - I get a new bigger faster drive & every other machine in the house gets an upgrade.

 

[NetCadet]

I've done this so many times that I have the switches memorized for the XCOPY command - LOL!

XCOPY C:\*.* D:\ /C /H /E /K /R