Possible to Copy entire hard drive?

[DaWhYteDraGoN]

I was planning on picking up a Seagate drive today fromt he local CompUSA, and I was wondering if it was possible to copy my entire current hard drive onto this new one. If so, what is it and where can I get it? It sure would be a hassle for me if I had to reinstall every single program I have, including Windows, because I would have to call microsoft and explain what I was doing etc...same with Word and Outlook. Any tips/ideas?

 

[Nohr]

Sure can. Norton Ghost has always done a good job for me.

 

[DaWhYteDraGoN]

Will everything still run/work?

 

[Nohr]

Yes everything will work just as it does now.

Slave the new drive and boot windows off your old one. Install Ghost and do the copy from the old drive to the new one. Remove the old drive and make the new one the master. Tada.

 

[alzan]

Due to a recent, similar experience; I would suggest that you have a boot floppy ready with the FDISK program on it. After ghosting to my new drive, I was not able to boot off the new drive until I used FDISK to make the partition active.

alzan

 

[DaWhYteDraGoN]

Ok, new problem. Ghosted myself a copy of the HD, everything went smooth. Booted up with the new HD and the old HD as a slave, also smooth. Took out the old drive, tried to reboot with just the new drive and then problems came. I am running XP, and it gets to the blue screen at the beginning (after the black screen with the scrolling green working bar) and freezes. This happens everytime, no exception.

What in the world could the problem be? SOMeone please help!

P.S. When I put the old HD back in, it boots up just fine, even though it is not being used as the boot device.

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: DaWhYteDraGoN
Ok, new problem. Ghosted myself a copy of the HD, everything went smooth. Booted up with the new HD and the old HD as a slave, also smooth. Took out the old drive, tried to reboot with just the new drive and then problems came. I am running XP, and it gets to the blue screen at the beginning (after the black screen with the scrolling green working bar) and freezes. This happens everytime, no exception.

What in the world could the problem be? SOMeone please help!

P.S. When I put the old HD back in, it boots up just fine, even though it is not being used as the boot device.

Can you confirm that, in Ghost, you did a *drive* copy, rather than a *partition* copy?

 

[dderolph]

I would taken a different approach. All the drive manufacturers provide software tools to copy an existing drive over to a new drive. Western Digitals software is called Data LifeGuard Tools; Maxtors, MaxBlaster. I don't know what Seagate has, but they surely would do the same.

 

[alzan]

When you removed the old drive, did you set the new drives' jumper to Single drive? It should be on the diagram on the top of the drive.

alzan

 

[ybkus]

When running just the seagate the BIOS is recognizing it right?