Copying A Hard Drive

Multiplasm

New Member
I have a 5 year old Compaq Presario, which is still running with all original parts, including the hard drive. However, of course, HP does not include recovery discs with the computer, but the HD does have a recovery partition. As the computer is getting older now, I would like to copy the 80GB HD to a 120 GB HD to avoid having to buy another version of Windows if the hard drive were to fail, and the computer is obviously out of warranty. I have browsed the internets for about two days on this matter, with some questions answered. However, I found a few conflicting articles on cloning and imaging. RAID seems a bit to advanced for me. I would like to know what exactly imaging does, and what exactly cloning does. Does imaging create a bootable cd rom that I can install onto the 120 GB HD should the OG HD fail? Thanks in advance.
 
Imaging and cloning are basically the same thing. RAID is totally different and has nothing to do with any of this.

If you're looking to clone/image your drive, look into a program like Norton Ghost. It'll copy your drive to a single image that you can restore at a later point in time should you need to.
 
Imaging and cloning are basically the same thing. RAID is totally different and has nothing to do with any of this.

If you're looking to clone/image your drive, look into a program like Norton Ghost. It'll copy your drive to a single image that you can restore at a later point in time should you need to.

Ok, so Norton Ghost would create an image to the other hard drive, or cd, should I choose. How would I boot this clone/image? The disk would immediately be ready for use?
 
I'm not familiar with how Norton Ghost works. I just know what it does.
 
If I read your first post correctly, it almost looks like you just want to get a new hard drive. If you got a drive, you could always go to the manufacturer page and download their software to copy the drives, as they provide software to do that. It doesn't make a ghost or image though.
 
Basically what you want to do in this situation is just clone the smaller drive to the bigger one. Usually the maker of the new hard drive will have a utility you can download that will do the cloning for you. What brand is the bigger hard drive?
 
Basically what you want to do in this situation is just clone the smaller drive to the bigger one. Usually the maker of the new hard drive will have a utility you can download that will do the cloning for you. What brand is the bigger hard drive?

The bigger drive is a Western Digital drive.
 
You can goto western digitals website and download their version of acronis true image which will clone the drive.
 
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