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How to copy a Hard Drive

P

Phedis

Member
Ok, I want to buy a new Hard Drive. I want to copy everything from my old HD to the new one so I dont have to reinstall anything. How do I do this? Is there a program you have to buy or something you can do from windows?
 
Two common programs for this are Powerquest DriveImage and Norton Ghost. I prefer Norton Ghost but I haven't tried DriveImage in a while.

DriveImage details
Ghost review by ZDNet

Hunt around online because there are fairly cheap (like $20) OEM versions of both of these programs available online.
 
For straight drive copying, Powerquest's DriveCopy 4.0 is the most cost effective solution. I use it every week on three machines to clone backup HDDs. It costs half as much as DI or Norton Ghost - the popular favorite. DC 4 is straight across, bit by bit copying of everything as it is - partitions and all in one operation with no restoration needed.
 
Most retail packaged hard drives come with software to assist with copying partitions to the new drive, since that's the most common reason people buy a new drive.
 
Lord evermore gave the best advice, if you bought a bare drive just go to the HD manifacture's web site and download there tool for doing this.
Dont pay money for programs that you can get better for free.
Bleep
 
Consider the Ghost version that comes on Norton SystemWorks Pro 2002 from newegg.com. Right now it's free after rebate, if you have pre-loaded versions of any Norton(TM) or Symantec(TM) software product, or own any retail (boxed or downloaded) software products from McAfee® or OnTrac®. Rebate form is on the newegg page.

This version of Ghost will let you make subsequent copies of your drive directly to CD-R.
 
Originally posted by: Lord Evermore
Most retail packaged hard drives come with software to assist with copying partitions to the new drive, since that's the most common reason people buy a new drive.
Click to expand...

They can be downloaded from the HD manufactures sites usally too.


 
Originally posted by: Jeff H
This version of Ghost will let you make subsequent copies of your drive directly to CD-R.
Click to expand...
Yeah . . . right! It would take dozens of CD-R disks to absorb one large HDD. I have never figured out the love affair with Ghost. Reminds me of Zip. 🙂 Why deal with all those CD-R disks?
 
I take it you don't perform backups all that often? There aren't that many reasonably fast methods to back up the huge hard drives common today. Tape is relatively simple, but also relatively slow, and expensive. CDR is very cheap and relatively quick with a fast burner, and burners are becoming more common than standard CDROM drives in new PCs.

It may take a lot of CDR's, but at least you've got the ghosted image, and it's only meant to be done occasionally to provide an image (in this case) so that you can fall back to it in case you screw up your system, or to allow an image transfer. It's not horrid for backups either, if you do mainly incremental backups rather than full backups, once you've done the first one.

Ghost of course can also simply transfer the image to another drive directly, I believe, rather than writing an image file, so you can make the first copy, and I believe the point was that the version of Ghost mentioned gives you the ability to perform a type of backup to CDR as well.
 
I would use the free software from the drive manufacturer, as others suggested. If you are willing to spend a bit, though, $149.00, for a program that is also good at regularly backing up to a HD, check out www.duocor.com. Their program is so much faster and better than DriveImage or Ghost. I used DriveImage for years, and had error messages and failures to restore, sometimes at the worst possible times. Duocor is so fast I now back up my drive every day in 2-3 minutes, and have never seen a glitch.
 
Well if you wanted to ghost your drive, and had a DVD burner, DVD±R or DVD-RAM might be a more attractive option than going with CD-R.
 
When copying stuff over to another hard drive, can you still do that within Windows? someone mentioned a DOS version of Ghost, do you have to just run that from DOS and it will transfer the crap between the old and new drive?
 
If you're copying your system partition (where Windows is installed) you have to do it from DOS. You can't do it in Windows because there are too many open files which won't be copied properly; the program basically has to take a snapshot of the partition, which it can't do if anything is changing.
 
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