move hard drive contents to new drive
 

basically, i have a 5600rpm 120gb drive for my main windows drive.
i want to buy a new 120gb 7200rpm drive, and copy all that info across - so i don't need to format and start again...

is it possible??

will partition magic do it? (copy a partition??)

Re: move hard drive contents to new drive
 

Norton Ghost

Re: move hard drive contents to new drive
 

so i can't use partition magic to do it????

Re: move hard drive contents to new drive
 

^^^ What he said.

Re: move hard drive contents to new drive
 

Looks like Norton have bought them out, now listed as Partition Magic 8 on the web site.
If you have a copy (maybe free with your motherboard) then try it, but I'd go with Simons suggestion and use Norton Ghost.

Link with a few ideas:

http://www.duxcw.com/digest/Howto/hd/cpyhd/

Re: move hard drive contents to new drive
 

No.

Partition Magic is software for creating/deleting/altering partitions on hard drives.

Powerquest (who made Partition Magic) has subsequently been bought by Symantec (who make Norton Ghost). They did have a product called 'Drive Image' which is the same as Ghost, but I guess Symantec have ditched it as they don't need 2 x imaging software products.

Either way, Ghost is the way to go IMO.

Re: move hard drive contents to new drive
 

ok cool - i'll try that then - was just hoping to avoid getting ghost - ah well....

Re: move hard drive contents to new drive
 

Never used the function but if you have a Maxtor hard drive a utility called maxblast 4 can duplicate a HD. I only use it for the tedious stuff but it's free and you only need one maxtor drive to use it :)

Re: move hard drive contents to new drive
 

How do you use Ghost? I have it but never really got round to it, and the user guide doesn't make much sense.

Re: move hard drive contents to new drive
 

Try this, it's in PDF format:

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/USCS/DTS/ghost/ghost.pdf

Re: move hard drive contents to new drive
 

All I wanna do is ghost my 60 GB XP partition (about 50% full) from the 60 GB partition on the IDE to the same on the SATA. I have Ghost 2003, presume this will work without screwing up the install?

Re: move hard drive contents to new drive
 

Just found this:

http://reviews.cnet.com/Norton_Ghost...-31000570.html

looks like possible probs with sata drives:

http://pressf1.pcworld.co.nz/archive...p/t-44615.html

Re: move hard drive contents to new drive
 

OMFG that was a total nightmare.

Installed Ghost, ran it, Advanced > Clone
Selected the partitions I wanted and clicked through
rebooted "missing operating system" - which was as far as I got when I got it about 21 months ago, then I gave up and just reformatted.
Thought... not gonna do that this time.
put the Ghost CD in and loaded the command prompt, found it and then loaded the ghost from dos, chose again, all seemed to be going fine then it comes up with an error (think it was 130060 or something, anyway it wasn't in the user guide)... so I tried it again. Twice more. Same thing.

By this time I'd given up on the Ghost (no puns) and thought... ooh can I still get into XP?
Rebooted and same thing "missing operating system"
swapped the Ghost CD for the XP CD and went into recovery console
ran fixmbr and fixall and rebooted "ntldr is missing" - hmm
went back into the XP setup and noticed that Ghost had faffed my drive letters around... the silly Ghost thing had created a C partition full of junk, and Windows was D, it was looking for C:\ntldr and couldn't find it... so, deleted Ghost's silly partition and exited the setup
You can imagine the look on my face when it booted XP.

Why the f*ck would it do this?

Re: move hard drive contents to new drive
 

Let me guess a look of ager, and that your laptop was going screen first out the second floor window?

Re: move hard drive contents to new drive
 

Ive found that sometimes when trying to ghost an OS onto a new hdd you need to actually start an install on said drive first.For example boot from xp cd then once all files are copied and the system first reboots stop the installation,then ghost your os image over to new hdd
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Follow the flash tutorials that come with it ;)

Also Nffc you can avoid the partition thing by creating a ghost start up floppy and booting from that,all features of ghost(except incremental) can be run using pc dos.Much better imo than running the windows interface