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How to transfer entire old HDD to new HDD?

T

Thira

Member

I want to do a complete mirror transfer of the entire old 10 GB hard drive to my new and faster 15 GB hard drive. I would like to keep everything like it is without having to reload windows or any of the programs. After making the transfer, I would like to reformat the old HDD and use it as a slave.
How do I do it?
Do I disconnect the old 10 GB HDD & reformat the new 15 GB HDD?
Should I make the new 15 HDD the master so as to take advantage of the faster speed?
How do I transfer the informatiom on the old HDD to the new one?
a) use Ghost?; if so how? Or:
b) I have a PlexWriter 12/4/32 CD-RW. Should I use CDRESQ? or:
c) I have a Seagate Tape Backup. Should I do a backup, reformat both HDD, set the newer & faster as master, then the older & slower as slave, and
restore to the faster HDD?
Thanks
Thira





 
Connect the harddisk as secondary master, use GHOST to copy old harddisk to new harddisk, then swap the drive - make new harddisk as primary master, & old as secondary master. After successfully booting to the new harddisk & verifying that programs
work correctly, you can then reformat the old harddisk & use it as you see it fit.
 
If you bought a retail version of your drive it should have come with a utility on-disk that'll do all that easily - format the drive, partition it and transfer the OS etc. Or you can go to the manufacturer's site & download it. This is cheaper than buying additional utilities, especially for something so basic. You really shouldn't need Ghost or Partition Magic or the rest to just install a new drive.

Also, see:
http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/stories/solutions/0,8224,2586419,00.html
 
GHOST.
DL an evaluation copy and run.
It's still the best clone program out there (IMHO).
 
ghost or you could boot up into windows and just copy every single file except win386.swp (the windows swap file) it is located in the windows folder
the best way of doing this is hooking the hd up as a secondary on the computer then open up windows explorer go up to view -> folder options -> view tab then look down that list and make sure the hidden files is set to show all then go to the new hd create a folder called Windows (unless windows is installed in a different folder on ur machine) then go to your old hd and into the windows folder find win386.swp click on it then go up to edit and invert selection the copy thos files into the windows folder u just created on the new hd
then go to the c:\ folder on ur old hd and click on the windows folder again do the invert selection and copy those to the new hd
it may not be as automated as ghost but u don't have to find a copy of it
 
Be careful when using SocrPlyr's method.

This method does not preserve the relationship between long and short filenames. Using this to copy a drive containing either windows or windows programs or both can lead to problems and broken installations.

It has when I tried it.
 
or you could just go to a dos prompt and type

xcopy32 c:\ d:\ /s /e /r /h /c /k /y

c:\ and d:\ just being your source and destination.

I do this regularly at work and it goes without a hitch
 
If I decided to go a new route, could I initially continue to boot to & use the old HDD while I do a clean install on the new HDD of the OS and all programs & data? I have so many programs & updates on the old HDD, it would take me a while to do a clean install, which I do prefer, except the time it would take me to do this. I could then use the old HDD until I got the cable modem, IRQ problems, and network sorted out on the new HDD. Then when ready, could I switch & have the system boot to the new HDD, reformat and make the old HDD the slave?
Thanks
 
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