need recommendations for hdd transfer solutions

[fred]

hi,

I've got a PC with 3 hard drives labelled C: D: and E: I want copied in
their entirety to 3 corresponding partitions on a single hard drive.

C: on master IDE1 is currently the boot drive with a WinXP boot manager
and contains a Win98 OS

D: on slave IDE1 is used for various purposes and data etc.

E: is a scsi drive connected to a scsi pci card, it contains the XP OS

F: and G: are master/slave on IDE2 and are both occupied by DVD drives.

Drive D: is in the process of failing and is casuing problems with both
OSes. I want to take out drives C:, D:, and E: and replace with a new
sata drive, (currently labelled H but I want the new drive partitioned
into 3 and labelled C: D: and E: so that the 2 Windows OS will not get
confused by the relocation of drive letters. H: is currently not used/empty.

What hard drive copying/cloning software will achieve what I want?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

Have a look at the item "Cloning a System Partition",
posted here less than an hour ago.

 

[fred]

hi,

I've got a PC with 3 hard drives labelled C: D: and E: I want copied in
their entirety to 3 corresponding partitions on a single hard drive.

C: on master IDE1 is currently the boot drive with a WinXP boot manager
and contains a Win98 OS

D: on slave IDE1 is used for various purposes and data etc.

E: is a scsi drive connected to a scsi pci card, it contains the XP OS

F: and G: are master/slave on IDE2 and are both occupied by DVD drives.

Drive D: is in the process of failing and is casuing problems with both
OSes. I want to take out drives C:, D:, and E: and replace with a new
sata drive, (currently labelled H but I want the new drive partitioned
into 3 and labelled C: D: and E: so that the 2 Windows OS will not get
confused by the relocation of drive letters. H: is currently not
used/empty.

What hard drive copying/cloning software will achieve what I want?

Thanks in advance.

Forgot to add...

All drives are the same format (fat32), sizes are C: 6Gb, D: 40Gb, E:18Gb

The new sata drive is 200Gb, the partitions I want for the copies of
other 3 drives take up about 64Gb in fat32 format. Is it going to
present a problem if I format the remaining space in 4th partition as
NTFS format or does the format have to be the same fat32 as the rest of
the partitions on the drive?

 

[M and D]

Check out disc imaging software by Symantec (Norton Ghost 10) and Acronis (True Image 9).

Steven

 

[Thota Umesh]

Casper XP is the solution to ur problem.

 

[fred]

Casper XP is the solution to ur problem.

Thank you all for your suggestions.
From what I can gather, after looking through the corresponding
websites and downloadable manuals for these products, it looks like
Norton Ghost is probably my best bet.
I'll give that a go.

 

[squire]

All drives are the same format (fat32), sizes are C: 6Gb, D: 40Gb, E:18Gb

The new sata drive is 200Gb, the partitions I want for the copies of
other 3 drives take up about 64Gb in fat32 format. Is it going to
present a problem if I format the remaining space in 4th partition as
NTFS format or does the format have to be the same fat32 as the rest of
the partitions on the drive?

You may have problems running Win98 on a hard drive of 200GB. There is
no problem having some partitions formatted as FAT32 and NTFS on the
same physical drive, but everything I've read on this subject indicates
that Win98 will only see the first 127GB of the entire drive and then
wraps round to the beginning of the drive. Its possible that having
Win98 in a partition of less that 127GB may prevent this but opinions
vary... there may also be problems if you run Win98's scandisk, fdisk or
defragger.

 

[Jonny]

Forgot to add...

All drives are the same format (fat32), sizes are C: 6Gb, D: 40Gb, E:18Gb

The new sata drive is 200Gb, the partitions I want for the copies of other
3 drives take up about 64Gb in fat32 format. Is it going to present a
problem if I format the remaining space in 4th partition as NTFS format or
does the format have to be the same fat32 as the rest of the partitions on
the drive?

What caught my eye is you have XP on a scsi drive.
Now you want all on a SATA drive.
HAL will be totally different because of both of these.
Imaging and restoring, or just copying with competent software just ain't
going to do the trick with XP.

Assuming the drivers are available, 98 may work, and you know how to strip
former drivers related to ide from it. The data drive is not a problem.

 

[M and D]

He's right. You'll need to do a repair install after cloning (to update the HAL). Cloning a hard disk (without a repair install) only works if you're cloning to identical hardware. In addition, I think you'll have to re-activate XP.

Steven

 

[fred]

He's right. You'll need to do a repair install after cloning (to update the HAL). Cloning a hard disk (without a repair install) only works if you're cloning to identical hardware. In addition, I think you'll have to re-activate XP.

Ok, you've lost me. What is HAL (apart from a psycho computer from 2001
Space Odyssey), and how much of a problem is it likely to be? Is it
something which could be fixed without a repair insall?

Anyway, doesn't XP let you activate about 5 or so times? This particular
copy has been activated twice already (once on initial installation and
once again after a motherboard swap)

 

[Roberto]

Ok, you've lost me. What is HAL (apart from a psycho computer from 2001
Space Odyssey), and how much of a problem is it likely to be? Is it
something which could be fixed without a repair insall?

Anyway, doesn't XP let you activate about 5 or so times? This particular
copy has been activated twice already (once on initial installation and
once again after a motherboard swap)

HAL - hardware abstraction layer, google for details
There is no limit to the number of times you can activate XP - on
the same machine

rgds
Roberto

 

[Anna]

(He adds)
All drives are the same format (fat32), sizes are C: 6Gb, D: 40Gb, E:18Gb

The new sata drive is 200Gb, the partitions I want for the copies of
other 3 drives take up about 64Gb in fat32 format. Is it going to
present a problem if I format the remaining space in 4th partition as
NTFS format or does the format have to be the same fat32 as the rest of
the partitions on the drive?


fred:
In response to a responder to your query who recommended the Ghost version
10 program, you stated you planned to use that program. Did you, and what
were the results?

We generally use the Ghost 2003 disk imaging program for our basic
disk-to-disk cloning operations although on occasion we also use the Acronis
True Image program (although I do not think that latter program is suitable
for your purposes re the direct cloning of individual partitions). We've no
experience to speak of with the Ghost 10 program, nor the Casper XP program
recommended by one of your responders.

While the Ghost 2003 program has the capability of cloning individual
partitions, we have run into problems involving the cloning of multi-boot
configurations such as the one you're apparently working with. I mention
this only because I'm not sure if you've run into the same problem with the
Ghost 10 program or will have, should you decide to use that program.

I don't think the fact that one of your source drives is a SCSI one and the
destination drive is a SATA one should be an issue re the cloning operation,
but I'm not absolutely sure about this in this particular case.

I would be interested in learning of your experiences re this issue.
Anna