Yes. You can get the new drive and then connect it up via a media bay module, USB/ firewire casing, or to a desktop via an IDE adapter. Then use a program such as Norton Ghost, which clones one hard drive onto the other so that they contain identical setups (including all installed programs, operating systems, etc).
After the cloning is done, then all you have to do is put the new drive in and you're ready and going (however, if you cloned say a 40GB drive to a 60GB... you will be left with 20GB that was not cloned, therefore will not be formatted. For this space to be useable it must be formatted... but this is a fairly easy process doable from within windows (as the unpartitioned space should show up as a separate patition)).
I'm planning on doing the same thing only with a 20GB HDD to a 60GB HDD. I'm going to use Norton Ghost 2003 to mirror the drive. If I understand what your saying, it will ghost only the 20GB and I will have to partition the other 40GB? I planned on doing this because I needed more primary harddrive space.
Is there anyway to keep the complete 60GB together without partioning it and still mirror it? Or I might want to spit it in half say 30/30. I guess that would be a good question. What is the advantage of partitioning the drive as compared to keeping it at 60GB?
Ghost is the tool you need for the job you are talking about. I use it all the time to move the data from say a 10 gb partition to 20 gb or whatever. Ghost will utililize the full size of the partition you are blowing the image onto if you do it right. On a similar subject, you can downsize as long as the data on the image will fit on the target partition (see below for reasons you may want to go the other way). An outline of the steps that I follow is below (you can do it any way you please, but this is what works for me):
1) image the partition using Ghost. Note: I don't image the whole drive, but the partition only.
2) install and partition your new drive as desired using the DOS fdisk partition utility or the Ghost provided gdisk program. If you want to create a partition with gdisk, it's one command at a DOS prompt as follows to create a single primary partion on the first physical drive. The command is:
gdisk 1 /cre /pri
When you do this, make sure you know what you are doing, because if you have the "wrong" drive setup as the first physical drive, the data on that drive will become inaccessible since you are recreating the master boot record (MBR).
3) reboot DOS to let the new MBR take effect.
4) blow the Ghost image to the target drive as a partition. Note: if you are using Windows 2000 or XP, it is probably best to start up Ghost as follows when restoring an image:
ghost -fdsz
This tells Ghost to restore the image and to reset some partition position sensitive stuff on the image. If you don't do this, when you for example take an image off of a hard drive's 2nd primary partition and blow it into a new drive as the first primary partition, Windows will get confused during the boot up process when it doesn't find files it needs in the expected partition number. This will be a common scenario for Dell users since it is common practice for Dell to ship their system with a small 30mb hidden diagnostic partition sitting as the first primary partition.
Slightly off the subject ... if you hate reinstalling software, I'd recommend that you reconsidering using just one big partition on your system. It's personal preference but I think a better way of partitioning your hard drive is to create a minimal primary Windows boot partition with the rest of the drive going to data and other stuff that is not critical for the Operating System. If you partition this way, your Windows boot partition won't get bloated up. This allows it to stay relatively lean and easy to image in the future. And believe me, if you hate installing software, you want to image your Windows boot partition anytime before you install a piece of software that you think may hose your system. By doing this, I feel safe to experiment and not worry about corrupting my Windows system and having to spend the next two days rebuilding my system the way it was before. You can restore the boot partiton without disturbing the other partitions. The way I use a system, I have about 10gb allocated for the primary boot partition. The rest of the hard drive space go to data.
Also, as Pesticide mentioned, after cloning the 20GB over to the new drive and formatting the leftover space, you can use a program such as Partition magic (I have this and its fantastic) to merge the origional 20GB partition with the left over 40GB free space to make one big partition.... its fairly easy to do. But really its quite useful to have more than one partition as you can back up important files onto the other partition, so that if something goes wrong in the windows one and you need to format you don't lose everything.
Just to be clear, if you follow the procedure I outlined above, you do NOT have to format or resize any partition to clean things up as described by the other posts. Ghost will take care of all that if you use it correctly. Ghost will take the image taken from the smaller partition and resize it to fully utilize the larger partition you blow the image into. So, for example, if you create an image from your smaller drive partition, you can then blow it into the larger partition, and you will have the full capacity of your larger partition usable right away.
sakor1
2.2K Posts
0
February 12th, 2004 10:00
Yes. You can get the new drive and then connect it up via a media bay module, USB/ firewire casing, or to a desktop via an IDE adapter. Then use a program such as Norton Ghost, which clones one hard drive onto the other so that they contain identical setups (including all installed programs, operating systems, etc).
After the cloning is done, then all you have to do is put the new drive in and you're ready and going (however, if you cloned say a 40GB drive to a 60GB... you will be left with 20GB that was not cloned, therefore will not be formatted. For this space to be useable it must be formatted... but this is a fairly easy process doable from within windows (as the unpartitioned space should show up as a separate patition)).
stu
RedsB3
106 Posts
0
February 13th, 2004 10:00
Here is another solution that I have used, works great, plus you can use the software and setup to do backups. I found it very easy to use.
http://www.apricorn.com/product_details.php?ID=225
inspir8100
18 Posts
0
February 14th, 2004 15:00
stu
I'm planning on doing the same thing only with a 20GB HDD to a 60GB HDD. I'm going to use Norton Ghost 2003 to mirror the drive. If I understand what your saying, it will ghost only the 20GB and I will have to partition the other 40GB? I planned on doing this because I needed more primary harddrive space.
Is there anyway to keep the complete 60GB together without partioning it and still mirror it? Or I might want to spit it in half say 30/30. I guess that would be a good question. What is the advantage of partitioning the drive as compared to keeping it at 60GB?
Thanks for the help.
inspir8100
DrGrov
18 Posts
0
February 14th, 2004 18:00
mclee025
35 Posts
0
February 14th, 2004 20:00
FYI:
Ghost is the tool you need for the job you are talking about. I use it all the time to move the data from say a 10 gb partition to 20 gb or whatever. Ghost will utililize the full size of the partition you are blowing the image onto if you do it right. On a similar subject, you can downsize as long as the data on the image will fit on the target partition (see below for reasons you may want to go the other way). An outline of the steps that I follow is below (you can do it any way you please, but this is what works for me):
1) image the partition using Ghost. Note: I don't image the whole drive, but the partition only.
2) install and partition your new drive as desired using the DOS fdisk partition utility or the Ghost provided gdisk program. If you want to create a partition with gdisk, it's one command at a DOS prompt as follows to create a single primary partion on the first physical drive. The command is:
gdisk 1 /cre /pri
When you do this, make sure you know what you are doing, because if you have the "wrong" drive setup as the first physical drive, the data on that drive will become inaccessible since you are recreating the master boot record (MBR).
3) reboot DOS to let the new MBR take effect.
4) blow the Ghost image to the target drive as a partition. Note: if you are using Windows 2000 or XP, it is probably best to start up Ghost as follows when restoring an image:
ghost -fdsz
This tells Ghost to restore the image and to reset some partition position sensitive stuff on the image. If you don't do this, when you for example take an image off of a hard drive's 2nd primary partition and blow it into a new drive as the first primary partition, Windows will get confused during the boot up process when it doesn't find files it needs in the expected partition number. This will be a common scenario for Dell users since it is common practice for Dell to ship their system with a small 30mb hidden diagnostic partition sitting as the first primary partition.
Slightly off the subject ... if you hate reinstalling software, I'd recommend that you reconsidering using just one big partition on your system. It's personal preference but I think a better way of partitioning your hard drive is to create a minimal primary Windows boot partition with the rest of the drive going to data and other stuff that is not critical for the Operating System. If you partition this way, your Windows boot partition won't get bloated up. This allows it to stay relatively lean and easy to image in the future. And believe me, if you hate installing software, you want to image your Windows boot partition anytime before you install a piece of software that you think may hose your system. By doing this, I feel safe to experiment and not worry about corrupting my Windows system and having to spend the next two days rebuilding my system the way it was before. You can restore the boot partiton without disturbing the other partitions. The way I use a system, I have about 10gb allocated for the primary boot partition. The rest of the hard drive space go to data.
Michael
Pesticide
3 Posts
0
February 14th, 2004 20:00
maybe partition magic can add the extra space to your original partition
ive also read that xcopy ( the good old dos thingie) has a cloning function , have to look it up in google
sakor1
2.2K Posts
0
February 14th, 2004 22:00
Also, as Pesticide mentioned, after cloning the 20GB over to the new drive and formatting the leftover space, you can use a program such as Partition magic (I have this and its fantastic) to merge the origional 20GB partition with the left over 40GB free space to make one big partition.... its fairly easy to do. But really its quite useful to have more than one partition as you can back up important files onto the other partition, so that if something goes wrong in the windows one and you need to format you don't lose everything.
stu
mclee025
35 Posts
0
February 15th, 2004 00:00