Moving data to a new hard drive

[craftech]

Despite a brief search I couldn't find an updated answer to this question.

I ordered a Western Digital
WD3200BJKT 320GB SATA-300
7200RPM Scorpio Black 2.5
Inch Laptop/Notebook Hard
Drive - OEM

to replace the 160GB hard drive that came with my Dell Vostro 1500 laptop. It is running Windows XP Home.

I am not sure how to best clone the 160 GB drive on the Vostro to the new 320 GB drive when it arrives.

I have the following:

Norton Ghost 2003

Acronis True Image 9

Right now I back up my desktop that runs Windows XP Pro regularly using a 3.5 inch internal HD that I slip into a drive caddy and boot to a w98SE floppy boot disk running Norton Ghost 2003. Then after I back up I remove the internal HD from the drive caddy and the floppy disk and reboot. Works perfectly. It doesn't seem that I can do anything similar with my laptop so I never back it up (clone it).

I think cloning guarantees the best results so I would prefer cloning the current 160GB laptop hard drive to the new 320GB laptop hard drive when it arrives.

But I am open to suggestions.

Any advice?

Thanks,

John

 

[IlllI]

i think you can still do that with your laptop drive. i forget if laptop sata drives have the same sized connection as 3.5 sata hds so you might need to get a little adapter for it to hook it up.

 

[craftech]

Originally posted by: IlllI
i think you can still do that with your laptop drive. i forget if laptop sata drives have the same sized connection as 3.5 sata hds so you might need to get a little adapter for it to hook it up.

Thanks IlllI,

I looked up adapters and found quite a few. Not sure which one you mean.

Also, my son has a Blac-X docking staton that accepts 2.5 inch drives. It has a USB interface.
http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/...p?ProductCode=10008418

I wonder if that would work?

1. Insert new drive into Blac-X

2. Transfer the contents of my Norton Ghost Floppy to a CD

3. Boot from the CD

4. Source Drive is old drive

5. Destination drive is new drive

6. Clone

How does that sound?

Thanks,

John

 

[IlllI]

yea, give that a try first.

 

[craftech]

Originally posted by: IlllI
yea, give that a try first.

Thanks IlllI,

Appreciate the support.

John

 

[craftech]

I wanted to follow up on this in case it will help someone else. I bought the Thermaltake BlacX eSata / USB version for around $40. It takes both 3.5" and 2.5" internal hard drives.

I usually use Norton Ghost to back up my desktops, but they all have floppy drives so it is easy to do in conjunction with a drive caddy. Using Norton Ghost 2003 in a DOS environment works well for both my W98SE desktops as well as my Windows XP Pro desktop.

The laptop (A Dell Vostro 1500) does not have a floppy drive so a bootable CD is needed unless you want to mess with this in Windows which I don't.

There is a procedure for getting Ghost 2003 on a bootable CD described here, but I didn't try it:

http://ghost.radified.com/bootable_cd_dvd.htm

Ghost 2003 is great, but it is really geared toward floppy disk booting.

Instead I downloaded the free copy of HDClone 3.7 from here:

http://www.miray.de/products/sat.hdclone.html

This created a boot CD and utility that easily cloned the new hard drive (320 GB Western Digital Scorpio Black WD3200BJKT). Keep in mind that the free edition intentionally takes longer than the paid edition (3hrs for me), but unless you are using it for regular backups it works the same for occasional tasks like upgrading a hard drive via cloning. I used the BlacX USB interface because my laptop has no eSATA.

A few problems I ran into. There is a Dell Media Direct Partition for the Media Direct "feature". It allows you to play certain media without booting into Windows. I never use it. Unfortunately I should have manually resized in HDClone instead of automatic resizing because HDClone made the media direct partition half the size of the hard drive. Yikes!

So here is what I did. Instead of doing it all over again (for 3 hrs) I put the new HD in the laptop and booted into Windows and deleted the Media Direct partition altogether. That left the partition "unallocated" space. Windows won't allow you to merge it with the C Drive so I had two choices. Partition Magic (which must be installed) or the free GParted by Sourceforge.

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

I have always liked Sourceforge freeware so I created a Boot CD using GParted and booted the CD. It uses Linux and creates a Graphical environment when it boots after choosing some options on the way. I used all the default options. Within minutes GParted merged the unallocated space into the C Drive and I had a large fast new hard drive (free from Media Direct). It kicked up some nonsense about a "dirty NTFS" when it booted the first time, but after the second boot it has been running perfectly for more than 24 hours and passed the HD Tach tests as well as Western Digital diagnostics with flying colors.

John