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Can I safely copy two seperate hard drives onto one new hard drive?

S

Squat

Member
I have a system that has two hard drives, C: is about 3 gigs, D: is about 1 gig. I bought a new 40gig drive. I would like to partition it into two 20gig "drives" and copy the old C: to the new C: and the old D: to the new D:. And then only use the new 40 gig drive in my system.

How can I SAFELY do this? What's the best method to accomplish this??? The data from my old drives is critical so I want to proceed very carefully with this. But I need to do this soon, I am about out of room on my old drives and need to upgrade.

Thanks for the comments, suggestions, help, etc!!!!

Scott
 
How much free space is on your 3GB drive? You can copy the data from the 1GB over to the 3GB, if room permits, and then you only have 1 drive to worry about. if you don't want to do that, you can add the 40GB drive to your IDE chain (remove a CD drive, if you have to, fdisk, format the partitions, and copy the 1GB data to the 2nd 20GB partition on the 40GB drive. Leave the system as is, with all 3 drives in it, and use Ghost to create an image file of C on the 2nd 20Gb partition as well. Shut down, remove the 3GB and 1GB drives, swap the 40GB drive back to the primary partition as master, and reboot to a bootable floppy. Run ghost again, restoring the ghost image file for C to the new C: partition. You may have to boot into fdisk afterwards to mark the 1st 20GB partition as active, but otherwise this should do everything you need.
 
The drives are on my wife's PC, so I'm not sure if she loaded or assigned any programs/data to the D: that may be referenced from the C: drive. So my basic assumption was to keep the new 40gig driving looking like the existing two seperate physical drives. That way I avoid any problems later if a program was expecting to use something on the D: drive and it doesn't even see a D: drive.

I haven't used Ghost in a LONG time, but when I did, I remember that it always copied the allocation attributes from the old drive to the new drive. So it would only define the new drive as "big" as the old drive. Is this still true or will Ghost now allow you to copy all of the data from the old drive to the new drive without altering how the new drive is fomatted and configured?
 
just yank the old drives, set up the new one the way you want it, put the old drives on 2nd ide and move the files over
 
it depends on what you want to do, but in my opinion cholley's way is a tidier job, with ghost you get an exact replica of the drive, this includes hardware profiles windows loads etc. it might be easier to simply copy the files you want over.
 
Although the info here is all correct, they have not given you the key piece of info that you need.

Yes, you can just plug the new drive in and copy your data over. But... if you use this option, you will have to reinstall your OS and reinstall your software.

If you want to copy the contents of the old drive in its entirety to the new drive, boot from the new drive and use it normally, you must use Ghost. Ghost will simply create an image of your old partitions onto the new, larger partitions.
 
bglad would be correct, you would need to install the os on the 20 gig first then go on to drag and drop files, one question though, is this drive going into the same computer as the other 2 hard drives? if so you may just want to go ahead and do ghost as you will not have to reinstall any hardware.
 
Yes, the new 40 gig drive is going into the same computer, replacing the two smaller drives. The new 40 gig drive needs to include the operating system.

Here's my plan of attack:

1.Format the 40 gig drive into two 20 gig partitions

2. Use Ghost to copy the old C: drive into the new C: partition of the 40 gig drive
**QUESTION....will Ghost try to redefine that partition to be the same size as the old drive it was copying from? If so, how do I get it to just copy without resizing the partition?

3. Use Ghost to copy the old D: drive into the new D: partition of the 40 gig drive

4. Remove the old hard drives and use only the new 40 gig drive in the system.


Any comments??????
 
Isn't it kind of ironic that several messages later, the general consensus was that you should use Ghost? wow...wish I had recommended that in the 1st place. (Wait...I did! 😛 )

anyway, Ghost has been revised several times since you probably last used it. You can resize partitions w/o any problems now, whereas in the past, Ghost was picky and only wanted to apply an image to the same size from which it was created. I would definitely fdisk and create the 2 separate partitions first, but Ghost should have no problem re-applying the image to the 20GB partitions. Just make sure you do disk to image file and not disk to disk. You should have no problems doing it this way. You could also split the drive up other ways, too. 30GB/10GB, 25GB/15GB, etc. The reason I mention this is because you may plan on using the 2nd partition for data only, such as Mp3s, zip files, etc. If you use the C: drive for the OS, system files, installed apps, etc, you may not need the entire 20GB to be your primary partition. I have an 16GB C: and and a 12GB D: drive. These are separate hard drives, like you had with your 3GB/1GB setup. Anyway, I used my 16GB as C: with just the OS, installed programs, etc and most of my data is stored on my 12GB drive. I still have 10GB free on C: and 6.5GB free on my D: Unless i completely fill my D: drive up, I doubt I will use the C: drive for general storage. You may find that 20GB for a primary partition is a little larger than you need.

Just something you may want to consider before you dedicate the full 20GB to C:.
 
altonb.....YOU DA MAN!!!!! 😀

Thanks for your help and confirming that change in Ghost!!!

I'll give it a shot! Hopefully I shouldn't have any problems since I got the scoop here first!!! 🙂

 
Just a word of encouragement to consider other alternatives. With only 4 gig of programs/data at issue, why not install a fresh copy of Windows and reload the programs, then copy over the data with a straight copy? That might speed up Windows, the install time shouldn't be that great, and then you get all your data on one 40 gig drive and can install everything on drive C going forward. I used to have an 8 gig drive partitioned into four 2 gig drives. I eventually moved it all to a single 40 gig drive and I am much happier with that configuration. Another alternative would be go keep the 40 gig drive as drive C (copying to the new drive C all the stuff from the old drive C), and then leave the old D drive in the machine. Just my two cents.
 
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