Dilemma, moving operating system to another hard drive

[Gomce]

Here's the deal,
I have 3 sata hard drives in my box,
250 gb hitachi
250 gb hitachi
150 gb hitachi

I need more space and found a good deal on 2 drives, 300GB Maxtor with 16mb cashe (pata) and 500gb sataII hitachi with 8mb cashe. I plan on buying either of these 2 (which one is at stock tommorow).

Now, My OS is on the first 250gb hitachi. I want to move it's entire contents to the new drive and make the old 250gb hitachi a storage drive.

Easy way to do this? Thanks!

 

[Bobthelost]

There's plenty of different apps that'll do the job for you, i use norton ghost but i think you can do the same job with a knoppix cd for free. There are also apps that'll do the job for you that can be downloaded from some manufacturer's websites aparently.

A quick search in the software forum will turn up a fair few threads.

 

[Gomce]

I need a proven working procedure,
Im not only replacing the hard drive, I will most likely be going to PATA (different channel than SATA the drive's currently on)

 

[Jiggz]

Ghosting or cloning is a proven procedure and it works everytime. Now if you don't want to take a chance, spend about some $$$ on CASPER XP and you can clone your existing hdd to a new hdd while you are in windows. One thing good about Casper XP you will not even go out of Windows while cloning. So here's the step you need to do:

1. If it's SATA, connect the new hdd on another SATA channel.
2. Boot into windows. Go to Control Panel-> Admin Tools -> Disk Management. (Windows might request you to initialize the new hdd, go ahead and do it Note: Make sure you do not choose to make the new hdd as a Dynamic HDD. Instead keep it as a Basic hdd)
3. Select the new hdd, partition it and the format it. Close the Admin Tools and then ran casper xp. From here it should be self explanatory.
4. After the cloning, you can disconnect the old hdd and you should boot on the new hdd. You won't be able to tell the difference except for the size of the new hdd.

A. If it's PATA, connect the new hdd as Slave (or even master if the old os hdd is SATA)
B. Follow the above procedures up to the point of completing the cloning.
C. Disconnect the old hdd and make sure the new hdd is configured as Master. And reboot.

Now if the clone is no good, all you have to do is to reconnect the old hdd and you're back where you started. Do not format or erase the old hdd until you are satisfied that every data you need is transferred including your os.

 

[Gomce]

Thanks Jiggz for taking time to explain,
I will try your procedure tommorow

10x!