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Problems copying hard drive..

leapingfrog0

Senior member
I recently RMA'ed my hard drive, so I just got my replacement drive yesterday and now I'm trying to copy the data on the bad drive to the new drive, but I'm having a little bit of a problem.

I'm unable to get most of the files in:

C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG

over to my new new drive. It keeps saying that it's being used by another person or program, and I've tried in safe mode and everything. I would use DOS, but DOS can't read NTFS drives.

Any ideas on how to get these files over to my new drive?

Thanks.

Andrew
 
what you want is a disk-imaging program like Norton Ghost. I'm not sure if there are any free programs that do similar things, but Ghost will let you make an exact copy of your existing drive onto the new one.

You might also want to try out Microsoft Backup, if you're running Win2k or XP Pro. It'll back up your primary partition and let you restore it exactly as is. Not sure if Backup comes with other Windows versions.
 
the other thing to note is that just copying the files from one drive to the other won't give you a usable copy of Windows, esp. since you're running an NTFS operating system. You need to use some kind of specialized tool.
 
Get a hold of a copy of PowerQuest Drive Copy 4.0. You can create a set of two bootable floppies and it is as simple a way to clone one drive to another. It reads and writes NTFS as well as all the FATs and can handle mixed modes as well. Ghost doesn't write NTFS at the present time, . . . and it is more expensive.
 
Corky,

I believe you are mistaken about the capabilities of Ghost. Look here.

leapingfrog,

What brand HD are you using? Most manufacturers have utilities available that will clone your drive over.
 
i would just do a complete reinstall and then setup everything. my performace when i did a clone of old hd to new made the hd only sustain ata33 even though windows showed ata100. i did a fresh install and the problem was resolved. just and fyi.
 
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