Wow, lots of misinformation flying around here.
faithsdad said:
I am in the process of configuring the new drive and can't figure out the
best way to pull over my "documents and settings" from the old one. Actually
the documents were easy, its the outlook files (ie. address book, old emails,
and outlook folders that I created on the PC to organize) and my "favorites"
in explorer.
This implies faithsdad is not looking to clone or copy his operating system,
but merely wants to transfer his user files and settings. That's what the
"Files and Settings Transfer Wizard" was designed for, though I must admit
that I simply drag-and-drop, as Sleepless says. Faithsdad said his old
drive is reinstalled as slave, so that means he's not booted into the OS on
the old drive, which means none of those files will be locked. They can be
copied easily. The only real problem is finding where the old files are,
and where they need to go on the new drive.
As for the discussion on "cloning", there are Clones and then there are
Copies. True cloning works at the sector level, and sectors are copied to
the target in the same order, including any embedded vacant sectors, as the
original. (Hence, a partition with fragmented files will still be
fragmented on the clone.) In contrast, a Copy works at the file level, and
all files copied to the target end up in whatever sectors the target file
system puts them in. (Hence, a partition with fragmented files ends up
being defragged in the process.) For the purposes of replacing a hard
drive, both methods work, if done properly.
Since the Copy method works at the file level, it really doesn't care if the
target partition is larger or smaller, as long as it's large enough to hold
all the files being transferred. CasperXP is a copier, not a cloner. I
suspect Acronis is also (although it's crippleware so it's not possible to
look under the hood unless you pay for it first).
The older versions of DriveImage, the partition duplicating feature in
PartitionMagic, and BootIt-NG are true cloners. BootIt-NG will not
duplicate a partition to a smaller partition because the target partition
must have at least the same number of sectors as the source. DriveImage is
smart enough to duplicate to a smaller partition as long as the sectors that
get truncated didn't have anything in them anyway.
For example, suppose your source is a 20GB partition with 10GB of data
fragmented over the first 14GB of the partition. CasperXP would require a
target of at least 10GB, the old DriveImage would require 14GB, and
BootIt-NG would require a 20Gb target.
(I'm not as familiar with all the Ghost versions, but Ghost started out as a
cloner, is now a copier, and somewhere in the middle--circa Ghost
2002/2003--it could be used both ways.)
Partitions and partition tables created with PartitionMagic are completely
standard, with no proprietary alterations--you are not "stuck with it" once
you start using it. There are some *boot managers* that create proprietary
partition tables so they can have lots of boot systems, and once you use one
of those you're stuck with it because nothing else can decipher the
proprietary partition table; perhaps that's what Ted is thinking of. But
boot managers are different from partition managers (which is what
PartitionMagic really is), and neither really is directly related to
copying/cloning.
But back to faithsdad's task: it sounds like you already found and
transferred your "My Documents" files. As for your "Favorites", browse the
new drive for the location of your Favorites folder (probably somewhere like
"C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Favorites"), browse the old drive for
the old Favorites, and simply drag and drop everything from the old folder
to the new folder. As for your Outlook files (assuming you mean Outlook and
not Outlook Express), everything (and I mean *everything*) is dumped
together in a .pst file--probably outlook.pst. If you can find that file,
copy it to the new drive. Another alternative is to put the old drive back
in place so you can boot from it, then launch the old Outlook and use its
import/export functions to create an intermediate file to copy and import
into the new system.
