I've never used Ghost, but it sounds like the ideal solution would be to backup the files you need, and then do a fresh install of Windows on your new drive. If your current drive is damaged, you cannot expect to get a reliable image of it. You may also want to d/l all your system drivers and burn those, along with your backed-up files, before swapping in the new drive.

I have used ghost nemerous times. I just completed an image from a dying hard drive with some bad sectors, and all is well on my new one after transfering the image to it. Maybe my bad sectors were void of any useful data or OS files. Anyway. It worked for me. Good luck!

bicyclebill1:

I was wondering if you can shed some light here...

I have tried using Ghost "copy my hard drive" with my Inspiron 8600 to change from Hitachi 60GB to Hitachi 80GB. It copied fine, but then when I change out to the new drive, it will not boot.

I get: "Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem. Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path & disk hardware."

Here are the settings I've tried in Ghost, but nothing works:

-Check source for file system errors: YES
-Check destination for file system errors: YES
-Resize drive to fill unallocated space: YES
-Set drive active for starting os: YES or NO (tried both)
-Disable SmartSector copying: NO
-Ignore bad sectors during copy: NO
-Destination partition type: PRIMARY PARTITION
-Drive letter: NONE or E: (tried both)
-Copy MBR: YES

In between each try, I re-format the new drive, and then delete the partition so it is unallocated.

Any ideas on what I should do? Thanks!

You have to create a set of floppy boot discs. At least with the 2003 verison of ghost. I don't remember exactly how I did this,but I did it several years ago, and have used the same two floppys many times since. If you will go to http://www.rickmktg.com/ rick can tell you where to find the instructions you need.

 

Let me know how it works out.

What finally worked for me to copy my drive to another drive connected by USB, using Ghost 10.0:

1) Turn off virtual memory

2) Do the following to the small drive (about 31 MB on my computer):
-Check source for file system errors: YES
-Check destination for file system errors: YES
-Resize drive to fill unallocated space: YES
-Set drive active for starting os: NO
-Disable SmartSector copying: NO
-Ignore bad sectors during copy: NO
-Destination partition type: PRIMARY PARTITION
-Drive letter: NONE
-Copy MBR: YES

3)Then do the following to the main drive (about 56 GB on a "60GB" drive):
-Check source for file system errors: YES
-Check destination for file system errors: YES
-Resize drive to fill unallocated space: YES
-Set drive active for starting os: YES
-Disable SmartSector copying: NO
-Ignore bad sectors during copy: NO
-Destination partition type: PRIMARY PARTITION
-Drive letter: E:
-Copy MBR: N0

Then I pulled my old drive from the laptop, and replaced it with the drive that was connected by USB, and it started up just fine. MAGIC!

Not sure if that answers your question, but I hope it helps.

Best regards,
Louckss