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Off Topic => Engineering => Topic started by: Iceman on February 23, 2005, 08:15:28 pm

Title: Copying an entire drive.
Post by: Iceman on February 23, 2005, 08:15:28 pm
Is there a way to successfully copy an entire drive (windows and all) to a new HDD? I want to switch out a smaller HDD and put my 'system' on a new 250gb one.
Title: Re: Copying an entire drive.
Post by: Bonk on February 23, 2005, 08:25:17 pm
I was gonna say Partition magic but Norton has bought them.....  ???

Here's an alternative: http://www.partition-manager.com/home/personal/download.htm
Title: Re: Copying an entire drive.
Post by: Nemesis on February 23, 2005, 09:04:02 pm
Quote from: Iceman on February 23, 2005, 08:15:28 pm
Is there a way to successfully copy an entire drive (windows and all) to a new HDD? I want to switch out a smaller HDD and put my 'system' on a new 250gb one.

I have used a program called Drive Image for that quite successfully.  They were bought by Symantec (owners of Norton Utilites) and I have not seen it on the shelf since, but I understand it is still around.

You could try Microsoft's own builtin backup and restore utilities.  I have never used them myself so I can't say how hard it would be to succeed with them.
Title: Re: Copying an entire drive.
Post by: Iceman on February 24, 2005, 10:43:35 am
Does the fact that I'm going from IDE to SATA matter? I wouldn't think so but I thought I'd throw it out there.
Title: Re: Copying an entire drive.
Post by: Bonk on February 24, 2005, 05:56:41 pm
Shouldn't matter... should be able to copy a partition from an IDE to a SCSI disk or even to a ramdrive...

unless you're talking taking a striped raid volume and reducing it to a single IDE drive... not sure about that... or fs-qnx to fat32 or some weird conversion like that...
Title: Re: Copying an entire drive.
Post by: Iceman on February 26, 2005, 05:47:54 pm
Nope. What I ended up doing was saying the hell with it and just grabbing what I wanted and putting it on my roomates 200gb external drive, installing XPPro in the new SATA I bought, and copying it all back. Took a while, but worth it. And now i have a clean install to muss up. FUN!
Title: Re: Copying an entire drive.
Post by: Dash Jones on February 27, 2005, 12:51:28 pm
ghost it with norton
Title: Re: Copying an entire drive.
Post by: Javora on February 27, 2005, 07:28:22 pm
Quote from: Bonk on February 24, 2005, 05:56:41 pm
Shouldn't matter... should be able to copy a partition from an IDE to a SCSI disk or even to a ramdrive...

unless you're talking taking a striped raid volume and reducing it to a single IDE drive... not sure about that... or fs-qnx to fat32 or some weird conversion like that...

A Raid setup should matter either since the system is going to see the Raid as just one drive.  Converting is another matter entirely, if you have to convert file systems then I would suggest just installing from scratch.  Dash's idea about Norton Ghost isn't such a bad idea either, I have Ghost as well and the program does pretty well.
Title: Re: Copying an entire drive.
Post by: The Bar-Abbas Anomaly on March 04, 2005, 10:33:39 am
Quote from: Dash Jones on February 27, 2005, 12:51:28 pm
ghost it with norton


What Dash said. 

Plug both drives in, boot from a floppy & run Ghost.exe and let it run 45 minutes.

One of the best utilities ever created.
Title: Re: Copying an entire drive.
Post by: Don Karnage on March 10, 2005, 02:49:42 pm
the best way is to first re intall your windows in your smaller hd and then transfers your data to the new hd, tranfering sfc to any hd is easy and working fine, i have done it before, only the sims will need to be reinstall because it leave a mark in windows  so it will only work if that windows have the mark.