copying hard drive to hard drive

[Guest]

I'm looking for a way to copy an a 10 gig hard drive to an
80 gig hard drive without having to install and load all
the software from one to the other. Is there such a
thing/way? Someone said something about x copy? Not
sure. Please help.....

 

[Pegasus]

I'm looking for a way to copy an a 10 gig hard drive to an
80 gig hard drive without having to install and load all
the software from one to the other. Is there such a
thing/way? Someone said something about x copy? Not
sure. Please help.....

You have at least five options:
1. Use the cloning software that many disk manufacturers make
available on their home site.
2. Use an imaging product such as Ghost, DriveImage, TrueImage.
3. Install both disks as slave disks in some other Win2000/XP machine,
then use xcopy.exe with the appropriate switches. You will then
have to repair the boot environment.
4. Boot with a Bart WinXP PE CD (www.bootdisk.com), then
use xcopy.exe as above.
5. Install a parallel copy of Win2000, then use xcopy.exe as above.

 

[Guest]

Sounds Great! We do have ghost installed on this
machine. Only reason I'm changing hard drives is that the
10 gig is full and I don't want to have to reinstall all
the junk that is on that hard drive. I'll do more looking
into the Ghost program to see how to get it to work for my
needs. Thanks again and any more suggestions is greatly
appreciated. This is what they get when they put a
firefighter in charge of repairing computers, me asking
everyone for help. I know how to put the wet stuff on the
wet stuff, not repair a boot sector or merge data,
etc...lol Thanks again!!!

 

[Dan Seur]

Sounds like you're running with just one partition using the entire hard
drive space. With the new 80GB drive you might consider setting up
something like a 15GB C: partition for the copied old C:, and a D: (or
whatever your next letter is on that machine) for data that is put on
there later. If you put as much non-OS stuff as possible on other
partitions, you lose much less stuff if the OS goes south and you have
to god forbid reformat the system partition.

It's also not very tough to move large clumps of data copied into the
new C: over to the new D: for extra safety. (You might have to help an
application or two, first time they're used with this new arrangement,
find the data in the new place, but that's a pretty easy thing to do -
if an app can't find its data, it tells you and asks you to help browse
to find it. Then it never asks again.

Good luck!

 

[Geoffw]

sometimes far better to do a clean install (assume here that
you can backup all your data) re install current apps and
preferences ands setup -THEN ghost the image then move all
data onto new drive.

continue to backup data any future problems reinstll the
image and copy data back

works for me anyway on a cire set of win2K , office premium
and a couple of other apps that I use all the time

good luck

geoff