Best way to copy a boot partition

[Compuzen]

My Western Digital 400Gb drive has a "bad" smart status, so I ordered a replacement for it.

I got the replacement drive for it and now I have to move all the data over. I copied one partition last night (bout 187Gb). That was my audio/video and stuff, but now i have the windows partition to copy. I wan't to make it an exact copy so I can just swap them and boot from the new drive. Anyone know of the easiest way to do that? I've read about Norton Ghost and Partition Magic, but they arn't really clear on how they handle a boot image. Is there a cheaper or easier way? The drive works flawlessly in a windows enviroment, but when I booted to the Western Digital Life Guard tools disk, but it errored when transfering. My storage partition transfered fine while in windows.

The drives are the exact same also.

Thanks for any help.

 

[Paperlantern]

ghost should work ok, though it depends on why smart is saying it failed, if its because of bad sectors ghost may have an issue unless you tell it to ignore those types of errors in the options. Ive never had a problem with ghost, sometimes it does take a try or two, but it works pretty well, and if your going disk to disk it should be easier, no image to make, no compression to worry about.

 

[dunkster]

I'd suggest running WD's Data Lifeguard Diagnostics before imaging. It does a good job of finding and correcting bad sectors. In my experience, a bad sector always results in failed image verification and unreliable image restoration.

Cheapest solution would be Terabyte 'Image for DOS' at $18. Better solution would be 'Image for DOS' + 'Image for Windows' combo for $27. IFD will do it all, IFW is faster for image creation.

I use IFW to image my Windows partition (5 gigs) to DVD weekly. IFD is required for image restoration. Excellent reliability - 5 flawless image restores.

Hope this helps!

 

[Compuzen]

Thanks guys.

So IFD and IFW will also copy the master boot record and let me boot to the new drive? Seems a better alteritive to $69 for Ghost.

 

[Zepper]

Yeah, most of the mfr's setup software makes what you want to do fairly easy and it's free!

.bh.