Transfer system drive

arfur · Post by **arfur** » Sat Dec 23, 2006 10:09 am

I need to copy the entire contents of a drive onto a bigger one then use that as the c:\

A few pointers please.

Post by **117** » Sat Dec 23, 2006 10:37 am

you wanna boot from the new drive etc yeah? norton ghost will do the trick, it has a function for exactly that

Post by **fac51** » Sat Dec 23, 2006 11:02 am

I always use HD Clone - works a treat - the free edition should be all you need although i have the paid version as the first time i used it i wanted to transfer to a smaller hard drive. check it out anyway as its far cheaper than Ghost.

http://www.miray.de/products/sat.hdclone.html

Post by **117** » Sat Dec 23, 2006 11:10 am

hadn't heard of that, will give that a try coz I do like the sound of free stuff

arfur · Post by **arfur** » Sat Dec 23, 2006 2:55 pm

I take it after copying I just whip the old one out, set the new one as master and job done.

Post by **fac51** » Sat Dec 23, 2006 3:03 pm

yep unless its SATA then you dont even need to set it as master.

arfur · Post by **arfur** » Sat Dec 23, 2006 8:54 pm

Good good, lets see if I can earn myslef ?20 like mixy

Post by **fac51** » Fri Dec 29, 2006 8:31 pm

Did it work?

arfur · Post by **arfur** » Fri Dec 29, 2006 10:53 pm

Doing it tomorrow. I have the cd at the ready. I'm sure it will.

arfur · Post by **arfur** » Sat Dec 30, 2006 5:11 pm

It was not 2 drives but 1, with 2 partitions. I went to make it one single partition but it deleted the wrong one.

So I am now firstly going to recover all of the files before doing a repair on the partition tables.

Of course all her photos are on there with no backups !! (It is a friends pc I am playing with)

Post by **fac51** » Sat Dec 30, 2006 5:43 pm

oops

why didnt you just copy the main partition over then just do a straight copy of all her other data?

arfur · Post by **arfur** » Sat Dec 30, 2006 6:09 pm

I though it would be easier to delete the empty partition then merge the free space back.

Wasn't counting on the wrong partition being deleted, was probably me but I was being very careful

Anyway this recovery is taking ages but I know it works as I did my dad's drive when the house got struck by lightning and fried everything electricla in the house.

Once I have the files on another drive I can play with rebuilding the boot record jobby without worrying about losing all the stuff.

I bet I end up reloading the OS in the end and copying back her files.

Post by **117** » Sat Dec 30, 2006 6:14 pm

easiest ?20 you ever made arf____

Post by **fac51** » Sat Dec 30, 2006 6:29 pm

shit happens though, i can sympathise :alt:

Post by **117** » Wed Jan 03, 2007 3:44 pm

I'm having problems doing this on the works' laptop - got a larger hard drive to chuck in it, and am using Norton Ghost's "Copy My Hard Drive" function which is for doing exactly what I need, however after running it and installing the new drive it won't boot, so having put the old drive back in and analyzing the new disc in the defrag software I can see there's no mbr, despite me ticking the option to copy the mbr ffs. So i booted to an XP disk to run fixmbr from the recovery console, but it won't let me feckin well login as Administrator to do it ffs