Ghost image of partitioned hard drive

[nittany77]

I am trying to make a copy of a hard drive that has 3 partitions. I made an image of each partition using Drive Image. I then partitioned the new hard drive as close to the original sizes as I could, but it is not exact. I can restore the image to the first partition, but the other will not work.

What is the trick to doing this? Should I buy some other software other than Drive Image?

 

[sieistganzfett]

i use symantec's ghost program. you can ghost "disk to disk" in order for all 3 partitions to go over. i do not think you can ghost just partition to partition 3 times and expect it to work. by the way, are the hard drives the same size that you want to do the ghosting? like both are 40GB for example? i never did it to a different size hard drive but would assume that the partitions would stay the same size if you did a "disk to disk" copy with ghost. or maybe you tried that but it failed booting the other partitions.

 

[nittany77]

I will get ghost and give it a try. The hard drives are the exact same part number and size.

When I first booted up the new hard drive today, I had to format it in order for the computer to see it. If I only format it with one partition, can I still ghost it with the 3 partitions?

Thanks for the help.

 

[sieistganzfett]

you dont even need to format it with ghost, formatting it makes it just so an OS can use it such as windows. when you ghost "disk to disk" it basically copies the entire hard drive as one thing, including all partitions on the source hard drive so if you use the destination hard drive, it will seem like the source to the computer. if you ghost "partition to partition" you only copy the one partition you selected. from what i understand from you, you want to do disk to disk since you want both hard drives to be exactly the same. i havent personally ghosted a single drive with 3 partitions, but have with one that had two partitions and it worked with the "disk to disk" option.

 

[Navid]

You should have no problem with Drive Image. I have Drive Image 2002 and have done more complicated tasks than that.

What exactly happened when you tried to restore the second partition?

 

[nittany77]

I don't remember the exact error message, this is on a computer at work, I will check on Monday and post the error message.

The only reason I formatted it is that Windows didn't even list it as an available drive until I did. I could see it in disk management, but nowhere else.

 

[Navid]

What are the three partitions?
Is any of them an operating system?
In some cases, you may need to perform the tasks from DOS instead of from Windows. Drive Image has a rescue floppy set that you can use for that.

 

[nittany77]

Yes, Window XP is on the first partition. The other two partitions are just data.

 

[Navid]

To backup data, you can also use the native XP backup utility under Start/All Programs/Accessories/System Tools. It creates a single file backup of any set of data files and folders you want.

 

[corkyg]

The best software for the task is Acronis' TrueImage using the CLONE function in a proportional mode. One operation will clone all three partitions to the larger drive in an exact proportional way. Images are not the way to go - they have to be restored. Think CLONING.