ghosting SATA 160GB with 2 partitions to 500GB SATA

[DeanimatE]

Ok basically ive got this Hitachi T7K500 500GB sata drive coming and right now im thinking of ghosting over my exisiting WD 160GB sata drive onto it.

The 160GB has 2 partitions. one is 30GB and holds my windows OS and the rest of the space is on the other partition.
Can i simply ghost my 160GB over to the 500GB and my partitions will all be there working fine?

any other issues to possibly look out for?

oh, also i am thinking at the moment to use ghost to do this. that the best program to go for and if so any preferred versions?

thanks for any help

 

[stogez]

Do you already have Ghost? If not, I like Acronis TrueImage better. You can basically backup your existing HDD to the new one and it will let you resize the partitions as well. Either program shouldn't give you any problems though.

 

[DeanimatE]

ive got an old version of ghost. 2002 Personal Edition i believe. though im a bit dubious if a version that old would handle SATA disks.

ill look into trueImage. see what shizzle dizzle is with it

 

[bruceb]

Ghost 2002 can not Write to an NTFS Partition ... Ghost 2003 and later CAN
As to the size of the target drive, it does not matter. The Image you make
will take up as much space as it needs and leave the rest free for you to
use as you please. What I usually do is make 3 Directorys on the drive I store
the images on.

Current Image
Previous Image 1 Back
Previous Image 2 Back

That way I have my 3 most recent backups ready if I need them
Just move the appropriate files into the directory. You can also
direct Ghost to make your newest Image directly to the Desired Folder

 

[DeanimatE]

ah well the 500GB drive wont be used to store images. im looking to ghost over 160GB onto it and then sell ther 160GB. Just praying there wont be any nasty old problems cropping up

 

[bruceb]

If you want to replace the 160GB with the 500GB you should Clone the Drive to the new one.
To Ghost it, you need a place to store the image until you switch the drive, then Restore the
Image to the new Drive .. most Drive Makers, have a Utility Program which will make moving
to the new hard drive very easy.

Here is a link to the utility from WD

http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp?cxml=n&pid=999&swid=55

 

[tcsenter]

I have Ghost 8.2 Corporate Edition, not fond of what Symantec has done to the consumer version of Ghost (turned it into a glorified backup and recovery program based on PowerQuest's DriveImage).

Ghost 8.x Corporate or Ghost 2003 (the last consumer version of the real Ghost program) allows command line switches to make the partitions do anything you want. I don't have the user manual handy, but the commands of interest are SzF or SzL.

One preserves the size of the first partition while expanding the last partition (e.g. partition 2) to fill the remaining space. The other does the opposite, preserves the last partition size while expanding the first partition to use the remaining space.

You can also set percentages for each partition; such as 30:70 or 60:40.

Check the user manual or implementation guide.

 

[corkyg]

I don't know about Ghost, but Acronis TrueImage 10 does this easily. Just do a cloning with the setting under Manual to Proportional. All your paritions will be copied proportionally on the 500 GB drive, and it will be immediately bootable.