HD cloning advice needed

[Geoff Skitch]

Hi

I have a homebuilt PC based around an ELITE motherboard with Athlon XP CPU.
The main weak link at the moment is the 40GB IDE hard drive which I used
from an old PC. I want to replace that with a 200 GB Maxtor DiamondMax 10
SATA Hard drive. I had pondered taking this opportunity of doing a complete
re-install of everything but I decided that is going to be too much hassle.
(For one thing I have Win XP upgrade so I will have to install Win 98
first).

So the obvious solution is to clone the old hard drive, but how easy or
otherwise is that? Maxtor's Maxblast 3 seems to be the best option in this
case. Does anyone have any experience of this or any other cloning
software?

One concern I have is that if I get it wrong I will not be able to use the
full 200GB.

Any advice gratefully appreciated.

GS

PS Please don't tell me a shouldn't buy the Maxtor as it is already bought
and paid for.

 

[philo]

Hi

I have a homebuilt PC based around an ELITE motherboard with Athlon XP CPU.
The main weak link at the moment is the 40GB IDE hard drive which I used
from an old PC. I want to replace that with a 200 GB Maxtor DiamondMax 10
SATA Hard drive. I had pondered taking this opportunity of doing a complete
re-install of everything but I decided that is going to be too much hassle.
(For one thing I have Win XP upgrade so I will have to install Win 98
first).

So the obvious solution is to clone the old hard drive, but how easy or
otherwise is that? Maxtor's Maxblast 3 seems to be the best option in this
case. Does anyone have any experience of this or any other cloning
software?

One concern I have is that if I get it wrong I will not be able to use the
full 200GB.

Any advice gratefully appreciated.

GS

PS Please don't tell me a shouldn't buy the Maxtor as it is already bought
and paid for.

no problem with maxtor drives...
as long as you have the free software that came with it you can always give
it a try...
if it does not work you can use another utility such as norton ghost

a couple of things to note:

1) if you end up doing a new install you do not have to install win98
first...
you just go ahead with the XP installation...the win98 cd will only be
needed for product
verification

2) put in and install your SATA card before you clone the drive

 

[Geoff Skitch]

SNIP

no problem with maxtor drives...
as long as you have the free software that came with it you can always give
it a try...
if it does not work you can use another utility such as norton ghost

a couple of things to note:

1) if you end up doing a new install you do not have to install win98
first...
you just go ahead with the XP installation...the win98 cd will only be
needed for product
verification

2) put in and install your SATA card before you clone the drive

Thanks for tip 1. Though it did make me realise I don't actually know where
my Win 98 disk is.

My motherboard has SATA slots on it so no need(?) to install a card.

I have read good things about Norton Ghost but I am loath to pay £30 for
software I will only use once. I will try the Maxtor software first and see
how I get on.

GS

 

[philo]

SNIP

Thanks for tip 1. Though it did make me realise I don't actually know where
my Win 98 disk is.

My motherboard has SATA slots on it so no need(?) to install a card.

I have read good things about Norton Ghost but I am loath to pay £30 for
software I will only use once. I will try the Maxtor software first and see
how I get on.

ok
if you mobo already has SATA you should be OK

 

[o-chan]

Thanks for tip 1. Though it did make me realise I don't actually know where

my Win 98 disk is.

My motherboard has SATA slots on it so no need(?) to install a card.

I have read good things about Norton Ghost but I am loath to pay £30 for
software I will only use once. I will try the Maxtor software first and see
how I get on.

GS

The Maxtor drive tools do well enough for basic cloning needs. However,
there is one area I've had difficulty. On a drive once I manually set
the swap space to be something other than the Windows default. When I
went to clone it read everything fine except that space. It doesn't
sound like a big deal but it was enough to make me try Ghost.

Then Ghost gave me issues. I wanted to clone a 120 GB drive to an 80 GB
one, and the 120 GB only had 40 GB of stuff on it. I know you're
thinking "why go smaller" but I wanted to set up a RAID0 using my
original 120GB drive SATA drive and another empty one, so I had to
temporarily moce the data somewhere. Ghost wouldn't just clone the
"used space". Ah well

 

[Art]

(irrelevant portion of posting snipped)...

Then Ghost gave me issues. I wanted to clone a 120 GB drive to an 80 GB
one, and the 120 GB only had 40 GB of stuff on it. I know you're thinking
"why go smaller" but I wanted to set up a RAID0 using my original 120GB
drive SATA drive and another empty one, so I had to temporarily moce the
data somewhere. Ghost wouldn't just clone the "used space". Ah well

o-chan:
There's no built-in problem with Symantec's Norton Ghost 2003 cloning a HD
to a smaller HD. All that's important is that the destination drive contain
sufficient capacity to receive the *contents* of the source disk. The fact
that you're cloning a larger-capacity HD to a smaller HD is irrelevant. Why
you had this problem I cannot tell. I understand that the original version
of Ghost 2003 did have some problems with SATA disks but this was
(presumably) corrected in later versions. Possibly this had something to do
with your problem. The current Ghost 2003 version is Ghost 2003.793.
Art

 

[Paul]

I have read good things about Norton Ghost but I am loath to pay £30 for
software I will only use once. I will try the Maxtor software first and see
how I get on.

Did you check the software that came with your motherboard? Mine came
bundled with Ghost. Worth a look.

 

[Bob Davis]

(irrelevant portion of posting snipped)...

o-chan:
There's no built-in problem with Symantec's Norton Ghost 2003 cloning a HD
to a smaller HD. All that's important is that the destination drive
contain sufficient capacity to receive the *contents* of the source disk.
The fact that you're cloning a larger-capacity HD to a smaller HD is
irrelevant. Why you had this problem I cannot tell. I understand that the
original version of Ghost 2003 did have some problems with SATA disks but
this was (presumably) corrected in later versions. Possibly this had
something to do with your problem. The current Ghost 2003 version is Ghost
2003.793.
Art

I can atest that this is correct. I clone about 15gb of data from a 74gb
RAID0 array to a small 20gb periodically without any issues.

 

[Geoff Skitch]

Did you check the software that came with your motherboard? Mine came
bundled with Ghost. Worth a look.

No Ghost with my motherboard but I have just successfully transferred
everything over using Maxblast 3 for Windows. The HD I bought was an OEM
version so it didn't come with any extras. However, I downloaded Maxblaster
3 from the Maxtor website and that worked a treat. Maxtor have lots of
product support articles on the website that can be very confusing. My
advice for anyone in the same position is just install and run Maxblaster 3
and let it get on with it.

The thing that took the longest was defragging my old drive. It was 93%
full and very, very fragmented. I started off using Windows inbuilt defrag
but after 6hours that was getting nowhere. So I then installed PerfectDisk
and that did the job but still took about 12 hours! Lesson 1: Defrag
regularly!

One other point I want to mention. The Maxtor website said that my
particular HD (DiamondMax 10) had both the 4pin AND 15 pin power connector.
It DOESN'T! It only has the 15 pin SATA power connector. Thankfully my PSU
has a suitable power connector, other wise I would have been very
dischuffed.

The only query I have now is about the partition on my new drive. I have
one 30GB FAT 32 partition and one 160GB NTFS partition. Should I leave
things are they are would it be better to make one complete NTFS disk?

Any comments welcome.

GS.