How Do you Copy From one Hard Drive to the Next?

[fouroaks]

Hey,

How do you go about copying all your information from your old hard drive to your new hard drive?

Please respond back soon...


Thank you :

 

[TechMasterChen]

Ghost Utility or some other type of Harddrive imaging software will do the job.

 

[brianp34]

Why not just put the old drive in the new machine as the slave and copy to the new drive? Saves you from having to burn a bunch of cd's of an image of the old drive...much faster.

brian

 

[Linflas]

<< Why not just put the old drive in the new machine as the slave and copy to the new drive? Saves you from having to burn a bunch of cd's of an image of the old drive...much faster. >>


This is how I do it as well. Only problem is that now I have so many folders on drives labeled "Old D Drive" etc. from all the times I have done this and promised myself I would go clean this mess up at some point.

 

[jcmoran]

The way I would do it is to install the new drive as a slave. Then using Norton Ghost I would create an image file of drive C and save it to drive D. Then I would reboot into Windows and move the image file over to a folder on drive C. I would then turn off the machine and make the new drive the primary master. Starting in DOS I would use fdisk to remove all partitions on the new drive C, then repartition it with 1 partition only. Then I would start the machine with the Ghost floppy (Ghost makes you create a floppy because the main program has to work in DOS) installed in drive A, so I can restore the image I created onto the new drive. I wouldn't need to worry about formatting it because it would end up with the same format of the drive that the image was created from. Once the new drive is up and running, I would reformat the old drive and keep it as a slave to store a Ghost image of my drive C that is never more than a week old.

 

[AzAbyss]

The easiest way is to use the "Disk to Disk" copy feature of ghost. It allows you to copy an entire partition or disk from the old to new without having to creat an image file. Just install both HDDs and ghost directly from one to the other. Easy as pie, I had a 45gig drive that I upgraded to an 80gig and it takes about60-90minutes to do a 15gig partition. Slow, but faster and easier than making and image. Hope this helps.

-Az

 

[jcmoran]

<< The easiest way is to use the "Disk to Disk" copy feature of ghost. >>


Oh, well I don't know where my head was! Of course, you're right! Nothing more simple than that.

 

[corkyg]

Ghost is great if you have it, but for that specific job it is somewhat slow and expensive. PowerQuests Drive Copy 4 will create a couple of bootable floppies that enable you to clone one drive to another, or even a selected partition, exactly as it is to include file layout. The real beauty is that it is OS independent - - - so Windows does not get involved. It also handles NTFS, and FAT version and mixed. A 40 GB drive cloning takes about 20 minutes total to do with about a 50% cpacity of stuff loaded. It is about $15 to $20 cheaper than Ghost or Drive Image, and it matters not what OS you have as that is not even used.

 

[GregANDTCH]

What brand are your hard drives?
I think Maxtor & WD have utilities to do this for you.
(for free)
One of your drives has to be their brand for it to work.

 

[minendo]

<< Why not just put the old drive in the new machine as the slave and copy to the new drive? Saves you from having to burn a bunch of cd's of an image of the old drive...much faster.

brian >>


maybe they are trying to copy the OS over as well

 

[corkyg]

Unless you are dealing with NTFS, you can boot with a DOS floppy and use XCOPY.EXE to do the job with the switches in this syntax:

XCOPY [d1]: /e /s /v [d2]:

That is independent of the installed operating system. To use it the target drive has to be formatted and bootable.

This is the old fashioned way. It is slow, but it gets the job done for free. But, if you are running with NTFS, forget it.