Getting new HD, how to make EXACT COPY?

[asabour]

I'm getting a new hard drive, and I want to know how to make an exact copy so I can just plop it into my comp and it will be the exact same as it is right now (but with more space because it is new). I tried that Norton Ghost last time I did an OS upgrade and it was terrible, I lost everything! I want to be able to have everything the exact way it is, I don't want to have to re-enter CD key's and change settings to how they were. Anyone know a program/method to do this?

 

[Passions]

Hi,

I don't know what you mean by Norton Ghost being terrible. I have used it several times and it makes a perfect clone of the HD. Do you have the latest version? You can also try Drive Image, that is another cloning program like Ghost. I used that sometimes too. Anyway, give Ghost another try, once you do it right you'll love it!!! Good luck.

 

[Rick014]

Have you tried PowerQuest driveimage.
It's very user friendly and easier that Nortons to use.
Also depending what make of drive your getting, some of them (I know Maxtor does) come with a utility to transfer the contents of an existing drive to your new drive.

 

[kgraeme]

PowerQuest DriveCopy. It does one thing: copies drives exactly.

 

[bunker]

I used Norton to copy my 30 gb harddrive to my 80 about a month ago and it worked great and was fast.

What verson of Norton did you use?

 

[AnAndAustin]

Well with older versions of Windows it was simply a case of using FDISK to create the desired partition on the new drive and then make it Active (so it will boot), then format it and manually copying each directory (including root) to the new HD, beware of swap files and temp folders, other than that it always worked fine for me and didn't have the hassle of having to copy the size of the old HD to the new HD, many programs would copy a 20GB HD so only make a 20GB partition on your new 60GB HD.

I now use Partition Magic Pro 7, it copies the desired HD to a partition of the same size and then can automaticly resize or convert the partition and file system, very fast and efficient.

However you do it, be aware that WinXP hates working with FAT32 partitions larger than 32GB (going above this is VERY wasteful in any case). If you want to avoid numerous partitions or headaches from 1 large FAT32 partition AND you don't need compatability with older OSs then use NTFS, it is very fast, efficient and adapatible ... esp with large partitions.

 

[R2D2]

Just get a Maxtor HDD (Get the DiamondMax Plus series).
Their hard drives have been very good to me (never had one fail)

All their drives come with the MaxBlast software, which will mirror your old HDD to your new one.
It is extraordinarily easy to use, and does a perfect job. I've used it zillions of times.

You might find it free on their website also (or elsewhere online).

 

[AnAndAustin]

With Norton Ghost, PowerQuest Driveimage/Drivecopy and MaxBlast which all copy the old drive data to the new drive, do they resize the partition or are you stuck with a partition the size of the original drive?

 

[Rhombuss]

FYI:

I don't remember Norton Ghost 2000 ever reporting the actual drive volumes, just the IDE/SCSI assignments. I think that's why a lot of people were turned off Norton Ghost because they accidently overwrote their source drive, hehe!. Haven't tried Norton Ghost 2001, but the 2002 is extremely good - fast and simple. But I'm sure any variation of drive ghosting is good, it's not a particularly complicated process so you shouldn't have problems, ideally.

 

[Rick014]

Can't speak for the others, but with dirveimage you can change the partition size.
I think you can do it with the maxtor utilities as well.

 

[kgraeme]

Originally posted by: AnAndAustin
With Norton Ghost, PowerQuest Driveimage/Drivecopy and MaxBlast which all copy the old drive data to the new drive, do they resize the partition or are you stuck with a partition the size of the original drive?

DriveCopy will let you copy to a different drive size. They say you can go up to 80GB.

 

[corkyg]

I don't understand the fascination with imaging to do a simple cloning job. Yeah - DriveImage will do it (Ihave DI 2002) but I do what you want every week. I keep three duplicate drives on hand and rotate them PowerQuest's DriveCopy 4.0 does it beautifully at half the cost of its more expensive brother, DI. I run it from a bootable CDR I made, and the OS never enters into the equation - nor the file structure. It clones an entire drive including all partitions in one operation. When done you are ready to run - no tweaks or restorations. In XP it always asks for a reboot because of "new hardware" - but that's it.

 

[WarCon]

I personally have never had an issue with Ghost, but I have seen here on the boards and even a few of my friends really mess up and copy the wrong direction. It probably isn't as intuitive as it should be. But I believe all the above choices with make an exact copy to a different size partition/hard drive. But you will have had to of fdisked and formatted it before hand with Ghost. The Maxblast software's main purpose is fdisking and quick formatting the hard drive to begin with. Then after that is done and you boot into the program again you can use the advanced features to copy one partition to another. I can't speak for drive image, but I hear it is really a good program and is easy to use.

 

[Toothpick]

Hey Everyone
How does these "Drive Copying" work ? I have never done this before and I saw this thread going pretty strong so I thought I would hop on in here

Anyway, if I had just one HDD which was 85% full and I wanted to use one of these utilities how is this accomplised ? Thankssssssssssssssss TP

 

[AnAndAustin]

Well you could use to it to keep a working backup on a seperate HD, but most people like to use them when upgrading their HD to avoid reinstalling their OS along with all of their apps and games. So basicly you have a 40GB with Windows installed as your boot drive and have just bought a faster, larger HD. You can just plug it in and FDISK and format it and then start installing to it, but many people prefer to use the larger, faster HD to run their OS and apps (maybe they want to sell on their old HD) so these utils can copy all of the data over to the new HD without upsetting the OS and, unless you copy the wrong way (copy your blank new HD over the top of your old HD ... oops!) you have the original HD until you're sure the copy works. How you do it precisely depends upon the program, but it is very straight forward.

 

[jjm]

I have a Maxtor drive currently running and I am looking to transfer everything to a WD drive. Has anyone tried using the MaxBlast software for this kind of transfer? I noticed that the WD software will not work with XP. Since I changed my video card and processor recently as well, will changing the HD cause XP to require re-registration?

 

[AnAndAustin]

Only if it's XP Home.

I've never used MaxBlast, but I know Partition Magic Pro 7 handles things very well, but that may be overkill if that's all you need to do.

 

[Davegod75]

norton ghost works great and you can choose partition sizes

 

[jjm]

I have XP Pro. I guess I have to invest in one of the disk copying software packages. That's pretty annoying for what will likely be a one-time use!

 

[AnAndAustin]

Do a search on the net, you will most likely find one or another of the packages mentioned do a free or trial version, esp Maxtor's MaxBlast. You can still get by without, just decide on your file system(s) and partition sizes, then FDISK, FORMAT and INSTALL Windows. It makes sense to do a fresh install now and again, if you don't fancy it then try copying ALL files 1 folder at a time from the root directory being careful with swap files and temp files (you may have to break the Windows folder in to smaller parts to ensure a good copy), it always worked with Win9x and should work with WinXP, just make sure you've selected show all inc system files in Windows. Oh, and you don't need to copy System Volume Information either.

 

[NascarFool]

I just did mine yesterday using Norton Ghost that came with my Epox 8K3A+ board. I formatted a floppy in XP using the DOS boot disk option and then added ghostpe.exe to the same floppy. I have three drives, 2x40 gig and 1x30 gig. All are WD drives. I saved the image to the 30gig drive and then set up my Raid Array on the two 40 gig drives. After that I restored the image from the 30 gig drive onto the raid drives. Worked perfectly.

 

[jjm]

Why is it so difficult to copy XP files onto another HD? I have downloaded the Max Blast program, but Maxtor's instructions appear to indicate there are some issues with XP. Does anyone have a used copy of Ghost or some similar program that will work with XP for sale cheap?

 

[ALstonLoong]

I tried the older version of ghost like ghost 2001 but ghost2001 doesnt work preperly in ntfs,so i decided to get a ghost2002. Ghost 2002 works fine in NTFS. I copy 2 HD with winxp and win2k each into 2 new HD, it works perfectly right now! If you gonna copy a HD with ntfs i recommand ghost 2002.