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Question about imaging and hard drives

StinkyPinky

StinkyPinky

Diamond Member
My current rig has a 250 gig sata, 160 gig sata and a 80 gig IDE. With the prices of hard drives these days, I want to ditch the 80 and replace it with a 320 sata. The problem being my OS (vista) is installed on it and I have it nicely tweaked and with lots of apps/games installed that I really don't want to reinstall at the moment.

Can I use imaging software such as Ghost to make an image of my C drive, plop in the new hard drive, and then reload the image onto it? Would Vista happily accept that? Remember also I'm going from IDE to SATA.

Of course if it does work it has the added benefit of being a quick way to restore if my system craps itself.

Oh, I also have the academic version of Vista. Would doing this mean I need to re-activate? IF so, how many times can i reactivate the academic version?

 
I've done nearly the exact same thing with Vista using Acronis.

If it all goes South, you can always plop the 80GB back in and be back up and running. IDE vs SATA should not be an issue as you have a mixed system right now.

I image my C: drive daily to another drive using Acronis for back up purposes.
 
Daily? Doesn't that take up a lot of time? I thought my doing it weekly was excessive! 🙂

Acronis is a GREAT tool, and I am fortunate to have it as well as fortunate to not have NEEDED it (yet)
 
Regarding your Vista activation query:
If you mean you got your copy of Vista via MSDNAA; then the activation rules are the same as the retail version. You'll only need to reactivate it if you make major changes to your hardware, and seeing as you're just swapping a hard drive then you'll not be asked to reactivate. Also, you can activate it pretty much as many times as you need to, on the one PC.
 
Originally posted by: CDC Mail Guy
Daily? Doesn't that take up a lot of time? I thought my doing it weekly was excessive! 🙂

Acronis is a GREAT tool, and I am fortunate to have it as well as fortunate to not have NEEDED it (yet)
Click to expand...
Well, it's scheduled to run automatically and on my system takes about five minutes. I do whatever I want while it's running. I don't have a lot of data.
 
The manufacturer of your new HDD probably will give you the software tools you need for this. I have a Seagate 500 GB I bought as the full retail package, and it came with a CD of software including their Disk Wizard that can do this. If you do not get a software CD with a Seagate drive, just go to Seagate's website and download it for free. (Seagate's package is based on Acronis, it seems). Yesterday I was checking out Western Digital and they have the same kind of functions in their free downloadable Data Lifeguard Tools for Windows or DOS. One important thing here - many companies set their free software to make these copies to their own disks only, so look on the website from YOUR new disk maker.

To do this job properly, the software will need to know whether or not you have support for "48-bit LBA" in your OS. That's what is needed to handle single HDD volumes (partitions) over 130 GB. In Win XP it was NOT in the original version, but is included in Service Pack 1 and up. Some of these software tools will run from a boot disk (CD or floppy) without any knowledge of an installed OS on existing hard drives. But in that case, it will play it safe and assume you can NOT use large hard drives, limiting you to partitions not over 137 GB (or 128 GB as Windows calls it). But if you get the version that installs on your hard drive and runs under the existing Windows OS, it will know the truth and use whatever Windows can handle.

When you run the software, look through its menus. Seagate's Disk Wizard (and, I'm sure, others') can take the new empty disk, partition it as you direct (up to one huge volume if your Windows allows), then format the partition, then copy absolutely everything from your current boot disk and mark it as a bootable drive. If you made a boot partition that is less than the full disk size, you then can create one or more additional partition(s) in the unallocated space and format them, too.

Once that is done, you shut down and unplug the system, swap around cables as necessary to connect the new drive and, for simplicity, disconnect the old boot drive (your 80 GB unit). On boot-up you have to enter the BIOS setup screens (usually by holding down the "Del" key as you boot) and specify which drive is now to be used as the boot device. Reboot and it should all run just as it did before, except that you boot drive will have about 300 GB total space instead of 75.

When you are satisfied that everything is copied and running perfectly, you can reconnect the older 80 GB drive and reformat it to wipe it clean, then use it as a data holder or whatever.
 
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