Move one hard drive into another?

[Antoneo]

Hrmm, I have the following:
1 80GB hard disk with two partitions: C: boot drive with Windows XP and H: with various stuff in it
1 200GB hard disk with one single partition E: with stuff in it.

If I free up about 80GB worth of space in the 200GB drive, will I be able to copy over the data from the 80Gb drive into the 200GB and still be able to boot properly? Meaning, will it look like I partitioned the 200GB like that from the start?

All drives are basic NTFS drives. I am trying to empty out the 80GB into the 200GB so that I may reuse the 80GB in an older machine.

Can this be done and what software tools would I need?

 

[southnjess]

I'm certainly no expert here at all but couldn't you ghost the c part in the 80 gb , make a part in the 200 gb for the drive size you want the Os to be on, then put the ghost image on the part made on the 200.

Then hook up the old drive to the sys as slave then pull the files across to the new drive.

I'm sure there is an easier way to do this though but as I said, I'm no expert. So people please correct me if i'm wrong.

Hope it helps though.

 

[FNC Jon]

Ghosting can work and somtimes it doesnt work. If the Hardware is exactly the same it usually works. BUt why dont you want to jsut re-install windows, alwyas gain perfromance when you do that as after time your windows install gets messy. Id recomend more of a fresh reinstall but copy all your data that you want to re use to your 200 gig and the copy it back after the frs copy of windows. But you m ust reinstall all the software and most of the games as most applications require regestry keys.

FNC JON

 

[JE78]

all I can say is if you decide to format either of them, make sure you unhook your 200gb with your stuff on it. I hooked up a new 200gb, formated it, when I booted to windows for the first time my old 200gb that had 150gb of important info on it was gone. With some help from this board and a few friends I got it all back with Partition Magic but I know next time to unplug the drive that has the important stuff on it.

 

[FNC Jon]

it happend ot me too but its becaus eyou need sp1 of windows xp to be able to se a certain size hardrive. so dont worry about that, it will however try to tell you that htere are errors on the hardrive (200 gig) skip it everytime cause it will go on forever, then update to service pack 1 or 2 and reboot comptuer and you will see the 200 giger.

later
FNC JON

 

[Antoneo]

Strange, I never had information disappearing like that on me. But I'll keep that in mind when it happens lol. The reason why I don't want to reinstall windows is because it is an absolute pain. I have everything right now set to exactly my needs (permissions, shared folders, documents everywhere and unorganized) and a reinstall of programs doesn't sound too appealing; it never does. The hardware setup will be almost exactly the same. If I were to ghost, I'd boot up with a hard drive less. I don't have Ghost or Partition Magic, has anyone done this with disk tools from the manufacturer?

 

[Trashman]

You can use software from the hard drive manufacturer, to move os from 1 drive to the other.
But, your problem is that 200GB drive has "stuff" on it....if you could transfer all data on the 200GB drive so you would have a clean drive to work with, you'd be ok, especially if you wanna partition that 200GB drive.
Is there a way you can backup data on that 200GB drive? Seagate for example has a great package of tools that'll make as many partitions as ya want, then transfer os from old to new....but drive has gotta be clean.

 

[Antoneo]

Yep, that was what I was planning to do. I'n fact, I'm burning some of it off now and will try to move the rest into another drive.

Ah, that information was particularly useful. I didn't know I had to have a clean drive to work with. I thought I could just make 80GB of space on the 200GB drive and image it on over. I'm running all Seagate drives too so it is great to know that Seagate themselves provides tools to make an OS move.

 

[Trashman]

Seagate software tools won't squeeze more space on a drive, that only could be done with partition magic.