How do I ghost my laptop drive to another laptop drive?

[simms]

What's the way to make a duplicate of my drive to another drive? Is the only option to have an external USB 2.5" drive and then ghost it that method? I can't exactly pop it in my desktop, right?

 

[Lord Evermore]

You can get cheap adapters to plug a laptop drive into a desktop IDE port.

Or you could use Ghost to write the image to a CDR or DVD+-R and restore it from there on the new drive, if you've got a writeable optical drive.

Or provide the drivers on the Ghost disk for a network drive mapping to another machine and write an image to that.

 

[corkyg]

I do it every week. First, I don't use Ghost. That doesn't play as nicely as Acronis TrueImage 9.

Here's the easy way. Get an external 2.5" Firewire drive case, and put the taregt drive in it. Since most laptop Firewire ports are 4 wire, you need a 5 vdc power source - good cases come with them

Then just CLONE the laptop main drive to the Firewire external.

What I do after that is swap the drives. That way I know the cloned drive is good, and the formewr main drive can get a rest. But you know it is a 100% good drive in reserve. That's what I call it - a reserve drive.

You can also do it with USB 2, but it is a bit slower.

 

[simms]

Wait a sec - I have a 400GB IDE external. Can I make an image of my laptop right now, save it on my IDE external, then pop in the new drive, load up the image from my IDE and write it into my new laptop drive?

 

[corkyg]

Making the image is not a problem. That you can do. But, then you have to restore the image, not just write it, or it may not be bootable.

That is why I prefer cloning to imaging. I have been doing this for over 5 years now - it keeps getting easier. But my objective is to always have a spare/reserve 2.5" drive I can put in my laptop if necessary.