Duplicating internal hard drive to external drive

[soupy]

I'm hoping someone can help me with this. I want to purchase a higher
capacity hard drive and have it replace my existing one. I would like
to make a bootable copy of my existing one by using my external USB
drive enclosure. My plan is to place the new drive in this enclosure
and use Powerquest Drive Image 7 to copy my existing drive to the new
one, then removing the existing with the new one

Will this work? I know Drive Image will let me dup from internal to
internal (primary to slave),but it's not clear whether I can use its
copy disk option to go to an external drive. The new drive will need
to be bootable of course since it will replace my existing drive.

Thanks for your help,

Stan

 

[CWatters]

The DI copy drive wizard says...

"This wizard cannot be used to copy to a network drive or removable media."
HOWEVER it does then offer me the option to select my USB as the destination
(or the source). At that point a box of tick box options pops up one of
which is "copy MBR?" Unfortunately I couldn't actually do the copy to see
what happens as I need what's on the USB drive.

One final word of advice... I've read several posts saying that it's vital
never to let your machine boot with _both_ the clone and original drive
installed. That includes any automatic boot after Drive Image has done it's
stuff. Apparently if you do let it boot with both connected then Windows XP
gets it's knickers in a real twist.

Colin

 

[CWatters]

I forgot to say that another of those options is... "set drive active (for
booting OS)

Colin

 

[Rod Speed]

I forgot to say that another of those options is...
"set drive active (for booting OS)

That obviously assumes that the PC actually capable
of booting the external drive. Some are and some aint
with USB and hardly any are with firewire.

More below.


Hopeless, that wording should certainly be cleaned up.

At that point a box of tick box options pops up one of

 

[CWatters]

Hopeless, that wording should certainly be cleaned up.

Are you thinking it would be easy to get them the wrong way round? Oh sorry
Rod. The above wording was my summary - the actual wizard is great. When
you run it you get a that says "select source" and lists your drives and
partions then another screen pops up and says "select destination" with a
similar list. There is very little chance of getting them the wrong way
around if that's what you were thinking.

 

[Rod Speed]

Are you thinking it would be easy to get them the wrong way round?

Nope, that it should be clearer that you can clone to an external drive.

Oh sorry Rod. The above wording was my summary - the
actual wizard is great. When you run it you get a that says
"select source" and lists your drives and partions then another
screen pops up and says "select destination" with a similar list.
There is very little chance of getting them the wrong way
around if that's what you were thinking.

Nar, I wasnt talking about that, just that the

is a bit clumsily worded and it should say explicitly that you
can clone to an external drive. You shouldnt have to see if
the external drive is listed in the list of destination drives, it
should explicitly say that you can clone to external drives too.

Many wouldnt be clear just what the distinction
between removable media and an external drive is.

Thats always been a problem with ghost, the text on the
screens isnt too bad when you know what they intend but
can be a real hurdle when you dont know for sure what
they are talking about when you first start using it.

Even the web sites are too vague most of the time too.

 

[soupy]

Thank you, Colin and Rod. Interestingly, I ran DI's Copy Drive wizard
last night to see if it gave me the option of copying a drive to the
usb drive(before I saw your responses)and I'm pretty sure I wasn't
given an option to copy to my USB Drive. I'll have to check that
again. I agree that the wording in DI's software and manual are
unclear - are USB drives considered removable media or not?

Stan

 

[CWatters]

Thank you, Colin and Rod. Interestingly, I ran DI's Copy Drive wizard
last night to see if it gave me the option of copying a drive to the
usb drive(before I saw your responses)and I'm pretty sure I wasn't
given an option to copy to my USB Drive.

Perhaps it wasn't switched on?

 

[Rod Speed]

Thank you, Colin and Rod. Interestingly, I ran DI's Copy Drive wizard
last night to see if it gave me the option of copying a drive to the
usb drive(before I saw your responses)and I'm pretty sure I wasn't
given an option to copy to my USB Drive. I'll have to check that
again. I agree that the wording in DI's software and manual are
unclear - are USB drives considered removable media or not?

Technically they can be but they're usually called external drives instead.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

Thank you, Colin and Rod. Interestingly, I ran DI's Copy Drive wizard
last night to see if it gave me the option of copying a drive to the
usb drive(before I saw your responses)and I'm pretty sure I wasn't
given an option to copy to my USB Drive. I'll have to check that
again. I agree that the wording in DI's software and manual are
unclear - are USB drives considered removable media or not?

A device is considered removable media when it has the 'removable media device bit' set.
Fixed disk drives will have it cleared.

 

[soupy]

Wierd. I rechecked DI's Copy Wizard last night and only one of my two
USB drives appears. Yet both appear in My Computer. The one that
shows up is the fixed 40 GB Maxtor external; the one that doesn't show
in DI is my USB enclosure fitted with an old internal hard drive.
I've never had any problems writing/reading from this external
enclosure drive. Maybe because this drive is FAT32 and the rest of my
system is NTFS? I tried reformatting this drive to NTFS using
Partition Magic, but although PM says it's working on it and asks me
to reboot, it refuses to change to NTFS??

And that's the USB drive enclosure I'd need to place my new hard drive
in to Copy Disk. Well back to the drawing boards.<sigh>

Stan