Ghost and hidden partitions

Coherence

Senior member
Jul 26, 2002
337
0
0
When I bought my Dell laptop 4.5 years ago, I bought it with the smallest HD available, figuring I could always upgrade it in the future. I was thinking of finally doing that now (since I don't have room to install Diablo III). I long ago upgraded the RAM, and kept the original sticks just in case Dell gave me any grief over it.

One thing I must say I like about my Dell, is that they built in a hidden partition and utility that can be accessed during boot which can be used to restore the original factory image of the main C: drive. I had to take advantage of that feature twice a couple years ago due to a nasty Flash trojan infection (rogue AV software; thank you FlashBlock for keeping me safe since then!).

I've heard mixed stories about how well Ghost can effectively copy those partitions when attempting to upgrade a laptop hard drive, however. Has anyone had any experience with this particular concern? Is there another option that might work (like gparted)?

I think Samsung includes Ghost with their SSD upgrade kits for that purpose, but I doubt I'll be putting that kind of investment into upgrading a laptop going on 5 years old.

Thanks for any advice!
 

Elixer

Lifer
May 7, 2002
10,371
762
126
Any good cloning software can copy all partitions.
I have used ghost, clonezilla, gparted, and many others, and never had any issues.