[Draftsman]

I just got a new HD and I have a shiatload of stuff installed I don't want to have to go reinstall everything.

Can someone give me a few links or suggestions on how I can clone my current windows HD to my new one???

Thank you!

[adamvjackson]

Either Norton Ghost or PowerQuest's DriveImage would work just fine, and both sell for about $70-$99 US.

[Christianb]

Thanks Adamjackson,
He is right those are the two most popular titles. Often you can get Norton Ghost bundled with Norton SystemWorks Pro for the same price as Ghost Personal edition so you might want to shop aren't. You can almost always buy Norton SystemWorks Pro (it has to be Pro to come with Ghost) for about 30 dollars and it comes with Ghost the same exact version! I think either CompUSA or BestBuy had systemworks on sale this week for 30 dollars with your choice of any DVD in the store. But I don't know if it was the Pro version or not. In any event here are some good prices for ghost:
Search DirectDeals for Norton Ghost.
-Christian[/url]

[CUViper]

If you don't want to spend the bucks, you could try DrvClonerXP from Lexun Freeware

[Christianb]

Personally I think it's worth the dough! You can treat your Hard Disk image like a zip file if you get ghost or drive image! In the sense of a zip file that is you can add and or remove files from your backups, which is wonderful. Think about it, if you get that freeware program and everything is peachy, but you overwrote some file with an older copy the only way to get it back would be to overwrite everything else. If you have Drive Image or Ghost you can just write back that one file. If you follow the hyperlink I posted it'll cost 6 dollars for Ghost 2002 OEM + 4 dollars shipping. Surely you can afford that?
-Christian

[CUViper]

2000 OEM is the one for $6... for ghost explorer and XP support, you have to get 2002, which is a whopping $18 8)

lol

No, I agree that Ghost is the better option for any kind of advanced backup/restore system, and it would be worth the price. But for a one time hard drive clone, the freeware gets the job done nicely...

[Christianb]

You have a point there. For a one time drive cloning there are other solutions. Does this application resize partions correctly regardless of FAT and or NTFS format? Because if he's getting a new drive it will most likely be a bigger, newer drive.

[CUViper]

Copying FAT32 -> FAT32 forces the partitions to be the same size, but going from NTFS -> NTFS can be different sizes.

[Christianb]

Hi CUViper,
Thanks for the reply. I assume this guy is getting a bigger hard drive right? So he'd probably want to fork over the dough and get Ghost. Although there are freeware partition sizing apps, but that scares me . Does anyone know of one that works okay? I think UNIX has some that while buggy work most of the time . You could always back up before resizing .
-Christian

[CUViper]

It's easy to try it out without losing anything...
[list][*]Hook up the new hard drive, as a slave or on a secondary channel.
[*]Boot into safe mode
[*]Use DrvClonerXP to clone from the old system drive to the new drive.
[*]Shut down, turn off system
[*]Remove the old drive, and put the new one on the channel the old one was on
[*]Turn the system on
[*] If it boots up, then hooray! You have cloned your drive for free!
[*] If not, put the old drive back in the way it was, and go buy Ghost... no harm done in trying![/list:u]And like I said before, if the destination drive is NTFS, it doesn't care whether the drives are the same size or not. But let's not turn this into a FAT32 vs NTFS debate...

Also, I used to have a couple of freeware partitioners around here somewhere... I never tried any of them, but I will post if I find them.

[adamvjackson]

Quote:

Also, I used to have a couple of freeware partitioners around here somewhere... I never tried any of them, but I will post if I find them.

I've used Ranish Partition Manager, works well, for free, anyway. I had to use it at work, as they didn't have a license to anything useful. It's available here for those who are interested.

[Edit]
It's been a few versions since I last used it, and it appears that it can now copy partitions, FYI.
[/Edit]

[Christianb]

Thanks Adam,
I have heard of this Partitioner. I will follow your link and give it a go. FDISK just isn't user friendly enough. I'm glad people out there are making an effort to create something more along the lines of Disk Management in Win2K.
Cheers,
Christian