Upgrade to larger HD?

[JClark]

I have a SCSI 17G hard drive which is going to be inadequate in the
future. There are two other SCSI hd's in the system. I made a ghost
sector backup onto one of the other HDs as backup (from DOS floppy).

Question: Can I install a larger HD, format it, and then restore the
original system from the ghost backup? My intuition tells me that I
might have to create a partition on the new HD which would be the
same size as the old HD, restore to that partition, then use partition
magic or some similar program to expand that partition to the size of
the new HD.

Does this make any sense?

Is there any other way for me to upgrade to a larger hard drive
without the pain of reinstalling the OS and all the programs, drivers,
data, etc?

Many thanks.

Jack

 

[GT]

I have a SCSI 17G hard drive which is going to be inadequate in the
future. There are two other SCSI hd's in the system. I made a ghost
sector backup onto one of the other HDs as backup (from DOS floppy).

Question: Can I install a larger HD, format it, and then restore the
original system from the ghost backup? My intuition tells me that I
might have to create a partition on the new HD which would be the
same size as the old HD, restore to that partition, then use partition
magic or some similar program to expand that partition to the size of
the new HD.

Does this make any sense?

Is there any other way for me to upgrade to a larger hard drive
without the pain of reinstalling the OS and all the programs, drivers,
data, etc?

Just keep the existing setup and add another hard disk as another drive for
data - separate OS from data!

 

[kony]

I have a SCSI 17G hard drive which is going to be inadequate in the
future. There are two other SCSI hd's in the system. I made a ghost
sector backup onto one of the other HDs as backup (from DOS floppy).

Question: Can I install a larger HD, format it, and then restore the
original system from the ghost backup?

I'm not familiar with the differences (evolution of
features) between each different version of Ghost, but yes
after some certain version # it had gained the ability to
restore a partition backup to a different sized destination.

You don't need to format or partition it first though, and
although I have not used Ghost for years so I don't recall
all the details of it's operation, IIRC the default behavior
is to expand the image to fill the entire drive so there is
no wasted space.

My intuition tells me that I
might have to create a partition on the new HD which would be the
same size as the old HD, restore to that partition, then use partition
magic or some similar program to expand that partition to the size of
the new HD.

Does this make any sense?

What you wrote makes sense except that Ghost has the ability
to restore to a blank unformatted drive and resize the image
to the available space on the destination drive... at least,
after some version it did, if not from the very first
version. It almost seems as though you would benefit from
reading the manual for your particular version of Ghost if
you're going to be using it to make data backups.

Is there any other way for me to upgrade to a larger hard drive
without the pain of reinstalling the OS and all the programs, drivers,
data, etc?

Powerquest's Driveimage (and I "think" DriveCopy as well)
will also do the job either by making an image as Ghost did
(Driveimage only, not DriveCopy), or direct drive-to-drive
copy.

The HDD manufacturer's utility disc will also often do this.
Some of them require you have the same brand of drive
installed in the system or perhaps now also requiring that
the operation is performed with at least one of the two
involved drives being that brand.

 

[JClark]

GT, Kony
I appreciate the input and explanations. I think that because of time
constraints, I'll just leave the smaller SCSI drive as the boot drive
and then shift any space-intensive data files to a larger HD, probably
an SATA drive.
Just as an aside, my ghost program is the old DOS one. Works great if
the destination disk is the same size and architecture. I'm sure the
newer versions do expand the situation, but it's too late to do that.
I also use Acronis on anothe machine and that is quite good.

Again, my appreciation.

Jack

 

[sandy58]

I have a SCSI 17G hard drive which is going to be inadequate in the
future. There are two other SCSI hd's in the system. I made a ghost
sector backup onto one of the other HDs as backup (from DOS floppy).

Question: Can I install a larger HD, format it, and then restore the
original system from the ghost backup? My intuition tells me that I
might have to create a partition on the new HD which would be the
same size as the old HD, restore to that partition, then use partition
magic or some similar program to expand that partition to the size of
the new HD.

Does this make any sense?

Is there any other way for me to upgrade to a larger hard drive
without the pain of reinstalling the OS and all the programs, drivers,
data, etc?

Many thanks.

Jack

Acronis True Image will "ghost" for you.

 

[kony]

GT, Kony
I appreciate the input and explanations. I think that because of time
constraints, I'll just leave the smaller SCSI drive as the boot drive
and then shift any space-intensive data files to a larger HD, probably
an SATA drive.
Just as an aside, my ghost program is the old DOS one. Works great if
the destination disk is the same size and architecture. I'm sure the
newer versions do expand the situation, but it's too late to do that.
I also use Acronis on anothe machine and that is quite good.

Again, my appreciation.

Jack

Ghost is meant to run in DOS it doesn't necessarily mean
it's really old (too old) to be DOS based.

 

[DaveW]

You would most likely find that the tiny 17 GB SCSI harddrive's external
BIOS controller will not recognize a drive larger than about 20 GB.