New Hard Drive

[Guest]

I have Vista Home Prem installed on my pc i purchased a new hard drive now i
want to copy my old drive to my new one, i am using Ghost (because i dont
know what else to use) i cloned the drive now it will not boot up, i put the
old drive back in and now it will not see the new one. So how do i clone my
drive to use?

 

[Paul Randall]

I built a W98 boot CD with Norton Ghost's DOS ghost.exe and gdisk.exe on it.
The computer is a Compaq desktop built around Jan 07 with Vista Basic
preinstalled. Prior to booting the computer for the first time, I
installed a new IDE (PATA) drive in addition to the existing SATA drive.
Gdisk was able to see both drives and the partitions on the SATA drive, so I
Ghosted directly from the SATA to the PATA drive. I then unplugged the SATA
drive and tried to boot from the PATA drive. Of course, it did not boot.

The problem was that Vista uses a different MBR (master boot record) format
than previous Microsoft OSs, and my old DOS Ghost didn't restore that MBR.
I'm hoping Norton will release a DOS Ghost that properly copies and restores
the MBR. I found a DOS program (mbrwizd.exe) that could copy the MBR from
the SATA drive to a file (its small, 512 bytes) and later restore that MBR
to the PATA drive.

I could then boot from the PATA drive. I have since ghosted the original
SATA drive to a 15Gb hard drive and I intend to build a set of bootable
DVDs which can be used to return the computer to truely 'out of the box'
condition.

-Paul Randall