how can i do a full copy of one hard drive to another?

[HOWITIS]

wanting to copy everything on one hard drive to one of greater size. how do i do that? besides backing everything up to cdrs.

 

[Jeff H]

A couple of programs that come to mind are Norton's Ghost and PowerQuest's DriveImage. Typically you set your current drive up as a master, and the new drive up as a slave, and do a simple drive to drive image. I've used Ghost a number of times. After you image the drive over you set the new drive up as either a single or master (depending on the drive model), remove the old drive, and boot up.

 

[helloedchen]

back when I was using win98, i just used :

xcopy x: x: e/c/h/r/k

copied everything over just fine for me...that probably won't work in win2k

but norton ghost is probably the next easiest thing

 

[corkyg]

If you don't have Ghost or Drive Image, you can do the same thing . . . probably faster, with PowerQuest's Drive Copy. The nice thing about D.C. is that it prepares a permanent set of two disks . . . one to boot and the other to run. It clones a 30 GB drive in about 15 minutes. It doesn't matter if you have multiple partitions . . . they will all be cloned exactly as they are.

DriveCopy costs about half as much as Ghost or DriveImage. DriveCopy 4 is the new version, but 3.0 works with all of today's Windows versions.

When you have multiple partitions it is easy because of running from its own DOS boot disk. It is one simple operation with both drives running.

I also used to use Xcopy and Xcopy32 with Win3.X, 95 and 98. It does the job, but slower. It, like D.C., runs in DOS. If you have a DOS boot disk with those DOS utilities on it, that will work also unless you are using NTFS. I had Xcopy32 on a DOS boot disk, and all of those switches written into a batch file I named XC.BAT.

D.C. can handle NTFS.

 

[dbroncofan]

I would suggest you just buy a copy of Ghost, it is a great program. Then after you have done this drive swap, use the old one to store a ghost image of the new drive. Anytime you need to install new hardware or drivers just create a new image on the old disk for backup purposes and then it will take no time at all to reimage computer if the drivers or software crash your system.

 

[Dennis Travis]

If you can afford it Norton Ghost is probably the best for copying an HD to another HD. I personally use Drive Copy like was mentioned above from Powerquest and I have never had a problem and it's affordible also. I just copied a HDD with both a Linux and 98 Partition to a new HDD and it works perfectally. Good little program for the $$$.

 

[WHipLAsh13]

Norton Ghost is the way to go. You usually find it by doing a search on google for ghost download.

 

[CovertCow]

When it does the drive copy, does it copy the registry in win98/xp?

 

[corkyg]

DriveCopy 4.0 is XP ready, and yes, it does copy everything exactly as it is from source to target. The best thing is when you do it from it's own boot floppy, it is doesn't care what the O/S is. It copies everything as is . . . registry and all, and can handle any O/S or format or combos thereof. By doing it from it's own boot disk, you don't get involved with Windows, and that is a huge plus.