A bit of help needed
 

Ok, currently my computer has two hard drives: a 3gb one and a 16gb one.
the 3gb one is six years old, slow and shit. but is still being used as my boot drive.
So, I bought a brand new 160gb hard drive (only £72).

What I want to do is have that as my new c: but i really really don't want to have to reinstall everything.
Is there an easy way to copy everything across?
I have been told to try Norton Ghost but have also been told that it's dodgy. Is that true? and in what way is it dodgy?

Thanks

Re: A bit of help needed
 

dunno

you can get things from the manufacturers web sites that copy things over though (ie, maxtor site if its a maxtor drive, they have some maxblast thing you put on a floppy disk)

Re: A bit of help needed
 

[guess]

Could you create a partition on the new drive, exactly the same size as the original, then just copy over the whole shebang from one to the other?

You'd need to be doign this from 'outside' windows, so you'd have to boot up via diskette or something to do it, but it is possible, no?

[/guess]

Re: A bit of help needed
 

ghost should work. it doesn't delete the stuff of the drive it's imaging, so if you give it a go and it all goes wrong, what have you lost?

-mist

Re: A bit of help needed
 

ghost is the best way to do it imo.

tihs is the wrong forum too

Re: A bit of help needed
 

Yeh realised it was the wrong forum... but needed help today not next week...

Ok, I'll try ghost. But why have people told me it's dodgy?

Re: A bit of help needed
 

because they are morons probably, and dont know how to use it.

Re: A bit of help needed
 

ok, i just found this:
http://www.fssdev.com/products/casperxp/
It looks like it does exactly what I need. And looks easy to use too.

free download here:
http://asia.cnet.com/downloads/pc/sw...064125s,00.htm

Anyone used it or know anything about it?

Re: A bit of help needed
 

nope.

Re: A bit of help needed
 

Ghost is by far the best program you can use. And one thing to note is that you should NOT at any time search for a copy of Norton on Kazaa and such places where you can find entirely illegal but working copies of 2002, 2003 and 2004...

There are 2 ways of doing the copy. One is to do a straight disc-to-disc copy, the other is make an image of your hard drive, save it to another drive that is not used/in another machine that is rarely used, and use that image to copy from. This also means you have a complete backup for later use.

I use Norton Ghost every day at work, and do not have any trouble with it.

Re: A bit of help needed
 

Norton ghost is indeed the way to go and NOT dodgy.

But make sure that your computer (i.e. the motherboard and Norton) does recognize the full 160GB, and not only 120GB or even 32GB. Because than it might become "dodgy" as people warned you.

Another nice program that boots from a floppy disk and needs 2 physical drives to create an identical clone:
It's called "PC Inspector CloneMaxx" and works fine, used it a couple of times. Especially good for broken drives that you need to clone one last time to get as many data from it as possible:

Download for floppy disk creation: http://download.pcinspector.de/pci_clonemaxx.exe
ISO for bootable CD: http://download.pcinspector.de/pci_clonemaxx.iso
Download.com: http://download.com.com/3000-2094-10...ml?tag=lst-0-7

Re: A bit of help needed
 

Oh, and be careful not to overwrite the source-drive with the (empty) destination-drive, that would be fatal.
Drive letters don't really identify drives in that low level, you need to know / check serials and sizes, or wether they're connected as master / slave.

Re: A bit of help needed
 

What do you think of the CasperXP program that I mentioned earlier?
That seems like the easiest program to use. I'm not wanting to do anything too fancy...

Re: A bit of help needed
 

Not much tbh...
"- Runs entirely from within the Windows environment!

- Exclusive SmartWrite II™ Technology ensures copy can be made even while you continue to use your computer*!"

I don't really trust those two statements. I don't think it's a good idea to make a copy of a partition while the OS on it is in use. Just a feeling, but not a good one.


Also you never know how these programs work until you've tried them. And if they fck up something, there goes the one try you had.
That's why I'd stick to programs I know or that other people have tried. The sure working thing, you know.



I'm not saying CasperXP is bad, maybe it's great, I just don't have a clue.
But Norton Ghost works for sure.


Just my very personal opinion.

Re: A bit of help needed
 

I've used ghost fine many times, in no way is it dodgy.
Reports of dodgyness probably come from idiots going "omfg a dos interface help help help what do i do noooooo!" and then deleting their source drive by randomly pressing keys.

It can also resize partitons on the fly as it duplicates, so your 3gb partition could be expanded to fill the entire 160gb drive if you like, or anywhere inbetween.

Re: A bit of help needed
 

Actually I've used both Ghost & CasperXP recently as I did the exact same thing as you are attempting now.

They are both reliable and great programs.

However I did encounter one problem that ****ed up the whole process and resulted in me having to re-install everything anyway.

What I wasn't expecting is that it seems Windows XP assigns drive letters based on hardware identifiers of the drive. Sort of how static routing to MAC addresses work on ethernet cards. Due to this I found that the new drive I had just cloned my boot partition to was assigned a new drive letter automatically and as it was a boot partition windows would not let me change it, as a lot of the old drivers & programs were expecting to find data on C:\ and not G:\ which had been assigned to it my system crashed in a big way and refused to boot.

I'm sure there's a way around this but I never had the chance to look into it.

Re: A bit of help needed
 

Clone the drive as usual.
Shut down and disconnect all other drives INCLUDING OPTICAL AND REMOVABLE DRIVES leaving only the one harddrive connected.
Start the PC.


Windows will probably panic for a minute, but it will have no choice but to assign "C" to the drive as it's the only drive in the system. Believe me, it ALWAYS does this and its driven me up the wall on occasions when I've been trying to do something else.
I'm 99% sure that would work.

Re: A bit of help needed
 

Yeah, of course there is a conflict if you've got two partitions / drives with identical data and boot sectors on it.
Anyway, it's enough to have 2 boot-sectors, it won't work properly. If I was Windows I'd try to boot the "old" one as well...

So, either try to use Partition Magic or similar tools and set one partition as ACTIVE (that you want to boot from).
Or just temporarily remove the other bootable drive...

Re: A bit of help needed
 

Ok, Big problem.
The trial versions for both Norton Ghost and Casper XP only do so much...

Casper XP will copy the disk but only into a 3gb partition onto the new drive unless I buy the full version.
Ghost tells me that I cannot do what I want to do through DOS in the trial version and I have not a single clue how to use the windows console to do what I want...

:(

I wish I was better with computers!

Any advice of where to find full versions? Or some freeware that will do the same easily?

Re: A bit of help needed
 

Use Casper, then use Partition magic to change the partition sizes as you want, unlike Fdisk you don't have to format your drives after changing partitions with partition magic.

Unfortunately I'm fairly certain the trial version of partition magic won't do this, so you'll have to get a full version somewhere.

Re: A bit of help needed
 

Suprnova has full copies of Partition Magic, or did a few days ago.

Re: A bit of help needed
 

There were no other drives connected at the time. Windows XP does not require that the boot partition be assigned "C", it can infact boot from any partition with any drive letter assigned to it.

It will only dynamically assign drive letters if it is setup to do so, otherwise it will assign whatever drive letter has been designated to that drive.