Ghosting Hard drive

jimmymac

jimmymac

VIP Member
Ok now its not something i have actually tried as yet so just wanted to clarify some thing on this.

I currently have 2 SATA drives and 2 IDE drives in my computer with a 3rd SATA on the way. Currently my operating system is on one of the IDE drives and I want it over onto one of the SATA drives. I definately dont want to start again with installing the OS and such so would be looking to ghost it over.

So how reliable is this? I believe Norton Ghost is the one people generally use, is it as straight forward of telling the program what you want to ghost and where you want to ghost it to?

Once completed I should just be able to set the bios to which drive to boot from and all is well.

Everything sound about right here?
 
I use Western Digital Lifeguard Tools to 'ghost' my HDD's... it's very simple this way.. you just boot up the program, tell it what you want to 'ghost' and where to 'ghost' it.. click OK and it does it.

The program may be limited to WD drives, though.

EDIT: I just tried the program on my Maxtor drive, I moved a DVD backup from my main drive to it, and it worked.. I guess it's not limited to WD drives =)
 
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its more ensuring that it will ghost the file structure of a system drive too though, the drive it ghosts to needs to be bootable from. I think i've found the correct options in Norton Ghost V12 so once the other drive arrives i might give it a go :)
 
Yeah, Symantec Ghost is a great program... though I've only ever used it to wipe and re-install XP on my old e-machines desktop.
 
Right i finally got round to doing this and having issues.

Using Norton Ghost i have asked it to copy the drive (c:) onto my i: drive, ensuring that i tell it to copy everything including the MBR.

However it fails when trying to copy the windows directory telling me it can't copy something in Win32. Anyone know of any issues this program might have with Vista X64 or if theres another decent program out there that could do the same job?
 
There is Clonezilla that runs off a LiveCD, have a look at this utility as it's free because it's Linux and I think it can make a decent roll-out disk.
 
This is the software that I use and it works great. I just backup my old drive and then restore it to my new drive. (Acronis® True Image 10 Home )
 
Well acronis seemed to work with the copying but not sure its managed the MBR!

After all had been completed i reset and enterd the BIOS to change it so that the SATA drive was the first boot drive, that comes up with an NTLDR missing error on boot!

This ones striking me as a tad problematic and i'm wondering if the issue is Vista and that it no longer uses Boot.ini which would tell the system where everything is. Instead its using this Boot Configuration Data (BCD) store which is more like a registry.....

Anyone had any experience with copying a boot drive entirely under vista x64?

Thinking just a reinstall of vista on the other drive might be the simple solution....
 
is that cloning any old drive or cloning a boot drive though? Especially one using vista that has a different Boot file structure?
 
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