Guru4u Forums

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

A few pointers please.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did it work?

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

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)

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

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.

easiest ?20 you ever made arf____

shit happens though, i can sympathise :alt:

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