making a copy of my current HD

[farmerandtheDell]

I have a 40gig HD that is almost full, and have a 160gig in the mail from newegg... I'd like to basically copy the entire contents of the HD to the new one, and use it as the primary, and use the 40 as the backup/ archive..

How can this be done?

 

[CrispyFried]

You may find thet the new HD has a util to do that for you, just follow the direction (Maxtor drives come with Maxblast that does this). There are other utils that will do this but Im not familiar with them. Hopefully someone else will chime in.

 

[farmerandtheDell]

Originally posted by: CrispyFried
You may find thet the new HD has a util to do that for you, just follow the direction (Maxtor drives come with Maxblast that does this). There are other utils that will do this but Im not familiar with them. Hopefully someone else will chime in.

it's a western digital, but I could probably find a copy of maxblast. I downloaded a copy of Norton Ghost yesterday, but I think that creates an image file which wouldn't be bootable on the other drive.. eh, I don't know. That's why I'm asking you all.

 

[geekender]

Norton Ghost does create an exact image of the hard drive. You can install both drives and then go into Ghost and do a drive to drive copy. That would be the easiest way, and your new drive would be the same as the old one.

 

[farmerandtheDell]

Originally posted by: geekender
Norton Ghost does create an exact image of the hard drive. You can install both drives and then go into Ghost and do a drive to drive copy. That would be the easiest way, and your new drive would be the same as the old one.

Really?! cool, then I should be all set. thanks.

 

[farmerandtheDell]

another question;

do I need space on my current drive in order to make the ghost image to transfer to the new drive? or does ghost take a look at the contents of the drive it's installed on, then make an exact copy onto the new drive that would be immediately bootable?
What I'm getting at is, I have only 2 gigs of room left on the 40.

 

[sivart]

use WD's utility that will come with the drive. I have used it before and it worked great.

 

[wseyller]

Basically all you need to do is install the second drive. You may need to create a partition and format it which you could do with disk management in WinXP. Not sure if Ghost would do that for you. In norton ghost in the utilities section it's called "Clone Drive".

 

[FlyingPenguin]

If you use Ghost to clone the old drive (Disk to Disk copy), the new drive will be entirely erased. If will ask you to specify the size of your partitions so you can make them bigger to fill the drive.

If there's existing partitions on the 160Gb drive you want to save this gets tricky. You HAVE TO overwrite the first Primary partition on the 160 - that becomes the boot partition. You can do a partition to partition copy, and specify the first partition on the destination.

 

[farmerandtheDell]

Originally posted by: FlyingPenguin
If you use Ghost to clone the old drive (Disk to Disk copy), the new drive will be entirely erased. If will ask you to specify the size of your partitions so you can make them bigger to fill the drive.

If there's existing partitions on the 160Gb drive you want to save this gets tricky. You HAVE TO overwrite the first Primary partition on the 160 - that becomes the boot partition. You can do a partition to partition copy, and specify the first partition on the destination.

Thanks for your help! actually, it's a new drive, so I didn't care what was on it. In fact, I installed the drive and windows couldn't see it so I downloaded the "lifeguard" disk utility from WD and used that to format the new disk.. with one button it created a bootable format for the new drive, and transferred all the files to the new drive. Then all I had to do was simply switch the sata cables and it boots from the new 160gig. painless.