Ghost question - format drive B4 ghosting to it?

[MichaelD]

Here's the situation:

I have a 80GB drive with 3 partitions.

I want to:

Take those same 3 partitions (the whole drive) and ghost them to a 300GB HD.

After ghosting, I will rearrange/resize them with PartitionMagic. Do I need to format the new HD first? One partition? Three? 😕

 

[demon42]

the image is stored as one file, so you can partition however you like, as long as the partition you save your image to is large enough for the image itself.

Your version of ghost may require the partition be in FAT32 to read it, but maybe not.

 

[Smilin]

no, you don't need to format first.

If you are doing a disk image instead of a partition image you won't need to partition first either. Actually IIRC ghost allows you to partition/resize on the fly when you are about to drop the images on.

I would suggest doing the partition resize with ghost during image drop time rather than fool with partition havok after the fact.

 

[MichaelD]

Thanks guys. I have an older version of Ghost (7 I think) and I know that all my saved images (and the partition they live on) have to be FAT32. I've never had a prob ghosting NTFS to NTFS partitions before. I've never done a whole disk though.

Thanks for the advice. I will use Ghost (if it lets me) resize the partitions...that would be ideal. :beer:

 

[networkman]

Originally posted by: MichaelD
Thanks guys. I have an older version of Ghost (7 I think) and I know that all my saved images (and the partition they live on) have to be FAT32. I've never had a prob ghosting NTFS to NTFS partitions before. I've never done a whole disk though.

Okay.. color me confused. 😕 I've used Ghost rather extensively and have not encountered any such limitation about saved images having to be on FAT32 partitions.

Another thing is, you can't create FAT32 partitions larger than 32 Gig in size, so how is upgrading to a 300 Gig drive going to be of use to you, aside from having the space to create additional partitions? I suppose the 300 Gig drive may well be faster than the 80, but then are other issues to consider like Bios limitations that may exist for drivers larger than 137 Gig.

 

[Smilin]

You can create FAT32 partitions much larger than 32gigs.

There is, however, a limitation of the format utility within Windows setup that cannot format larger than ~30.

In any case FAT32 sucks so use NTFS 😀

 

[networkman]

Learn something new every day. 🙂 On a whim, I did check around and found a site HERE indicating that you can setup a 250 Gig Fat32 partition with relative ease. I think I'll give it a whirl this weekend just for the heck of it. 😛

But I agree - NTFS is the way to go. 🙂

 

[MichaelD]

Hi there.

The reasons I'm moving these 3 partitions on the 80GB drive to a 300GB are:

1. The 80GB is an old 2MB cache IDE drive and it's slower than you know what
2. I'm out of room on the 80GB drive
3. I don't have all the software with me to reinstall my apps and games, (just WinXP and Office) so a format from scratch is not an option unless I really have to.

All my partitions, except the Ghost partition, are NTFS.