Restore Partition Questions

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@Spiked_martini wrote:

So... my 8100 is dead, but I had upgraded its harddrive to a 60GB 7200rpm version. If I get a new 9300, I don't want to pay extra for something that's the same as what I already have (and I don't need the extra storage space), so I'll just be swapping hard drives.

 

But, there's the question of the restore partition. I don't own Norton Ghost, and don't really want to buy it for $100CDN in order to make an image of the hard drive before I swap it out. I'll likely be using the original drive (with the partition) as an external drive, in an external case I have, and if something catastrophic happens, I can just swap the 2 hard drives and boot up in factory condition, right?

 

Is there any other way, short of using Ghost, to get the partition migrated over to the 7200rpm drive? I mean, I can create a separate partition and format it in FAT rather than NTFS or whatever (got my 8100 running 98 and XP dual-boot, after all), but I don't know how to hide the partition while maintaining the ability to copy files onto it... is this simpler than I'm imagining it to be? Is it not worth trying, since I'll have a hard drive with the necessary partition around if I need it?

 

Thanks!

 

If you want the old drive to be your new boot drive, then you will need to either reinstall XP or buy an imaging program like Ghost or Acronis True Image.  Then, you can image the entire drive, bootup, ensure it all works including the Restore Partition, then use the imaging product to store backups on your external drive.