Ghost is piece of c**** - heard it b4r and agree.
True Image is good - heard it b4r but disagree as I can't make it to work either (I accept that I am lil' dumb, but not that much so as not a small software work)

Basically I have 80 Gig IDE rite now (which I want to take out) and bought a new 250 Gig IDE (Bought SATA earlier but couldn't make it work after cloning it, lot of forums said IDE to SATA cloning doesn't really work). I have two partitions on 80 gig (20 + 60 approx.). Just want to clone my C:\ (of 80 Gig) onto new 250 Gig. But I want two partitions on 250 gig as well (50 + 200) . 50 gig would be C:\ and rest 200 gig for other data.

Tried make a copy using Ghost 9.0, it makes a copy but as soon as I take out 80 Gig and boot from new HDD, it just hangs at the startup with a blank black screen (DOS like) with a cursor. I looked up this thread http://www.ntcompatible.com/Norton_Ghost_V9_Disk_Copy_Issue_-_Please_Help_t30636.html, and downloaded True Image 9.0. Tried to clone with True Image. It shows that its cloning and shows the final "congratulations screen" but when I try to boot with new HDD, it gives me NTDLR error. I checked the HDD, it was blank, True image didn't copy any files. I repeated the process and same problem........... I am trumped.........

I noticed one thing, my C:\ drive on original 80 Gig HDD, though is a 'Basic' 'NTFS' volume, but is not set as 'Active'. When I write click on it in the Disk Management console, the option "Mark Partition as active" is inactive (unclick-able Gray) by default. Since therez no active partition, could this be problem that cloning is not working (I doubt it , but who knows.........).

I feel so stupid & frustrated, only if I didn't have tons of licensed sofa we installed on old HDD, I would have just did the clean reinstall, but its too much work and then I don't have CD's/keys to many of those software’s now (I lost my box during moving last year). Thatz why I bought backup software........ And now that investment has proven to be useless so far......... Please somebody guide me what to do ..........how to clone C:\ on old HDD to C:\ on new, given that I want atleast 2 partitions on new HDD, not just one C:\ of 250 gigs.

Thx in Advance

~jagged

Ok, I finally found a way to fix mt problem. my new HDD is segate. I downloaded DiscWizard off their website http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/drivers/discwiz.html. Used that wizard to format the drive and move data from old drive to new drive. It does everything by itself, no need of Ghost or TrueImage. The wizard interface is very simple and guides you pretty well.

Now I wonder if I ever really should have spent that money to buy Ghost.......... I guess I can still use it to take my backups, but if the intention is to clone a drive its pretty much useless or a very painful proccess.

I only use Ghost 2003 as I do not trust cloning from within Windows and 2003 is included with Ghost 9.

Sounds like you did something wrong as I think I have seen this problem posted on the offical forums for True Image.

For Ghost you can get info at Ghost Radified and they also have a forum that is all about Ghost.

Bye

You could have also used the special switch in ghost

GHOST.EXE -ib

This forces a copy of the boot partition information. It works, I ran into the same problem upgrading my 120gig IDE to 320gig IDE. OS was XP sp2

Works as well for any Windows workstation or server based OS, as long as its an NTFS partition. You can also resize that boot partion on the fly, when using Ghost with the -IB switch.

Hi,
I studied of this thread, so this is my opinion.
First of all, what space was used on your "C" (80GB) partition?
If it was more then 50 GB it could be the cause of faild copying. Another way is that you wanted to have 2 partitions on your HDD, but True Image restore copy on one partition, if you didn't create partitions it could be the problem too.
Especially to make partitions and copy them to another drive you could use partition manager. At first create the needed size partitions, then just copy. I supose it'll be easier to do, because you could check all info about your HDDs and make them active, primary, logical or whatever you need.

EASEUS Disk Copy is a Free software, which can create an exact (Mirror Image, Disk to Disk) copy of your old disk, including the operating system, applications, personal preferences, custom settings, and all of your vital data. Disk Copy can be used for backup, cloning, or Upgrading your original small hard drive to a new larger drive. It can backup Anything from old hard drive including deleted, lost files and inaccessible data. Essential Utility for Disaster Recovery.

see: http://www.easeus.com

With regard to the software called Disk Copy 1.0 from the website link above. After researching there software I contacted there customer support and apparently it DOES NOT allow you to image from an IDE drive and place that image on a SATA drive. Below is a cut and paste from there email. Thanks to whomever posted the link to that free software, unfortunatly it will not help in this current IDE ot SATA image copy delemma.

Les Elton
------------------------------------------------------
Hello,

We are sorry for this.

The Disk Copy 1.0 can not support copying from and IDE ATA drive to IDE
Serial ATA drive
We are always to improve our software.

Please let us know if you have any additional question.

With Best Regards,

Support Team P

==================
support@easeus.com

EaseUs support knowledge base:
http://www.easeus.com/support.htm

Hi.
Did you use a trial version of Acronis True Image 9.0?

thank you for posting the info on EaseUs diskcopy. I used CompuApps DriveWizard Pro last night to mirror an 80GB hard drive and it took 11 hours. (DWP runs inside of windows, maybe that is why)

I tried Easeus diskcopy this afternoon, and it estimates it will take 1 hour 15 minutes. What a relief! It creates a bootable cd-rom so you mirror your drive without being in windows. The only compliant I have is that they make you put the source disk on ide primary slot 0 and the target disk on ide sceondary slot 0. IDE sec slot 0 is usually where the cd rom is and I had to physically reomve it, change the jumper, put it on ide sceon slot 1 as slave, and then change the bios to recognize the cd-rom on that postion, and then to boot from the cd-rom, but it is still better than waiting 11 hours for a mirror to finish.