Moving OS to newer, bigger drive; which software?

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BuudWeizErr

Gawd
Joined
Jan 14, 2002
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Hopefully you guys can help me out here, the retards over at genmay are becoming more useless by the day. Anyway, I am putting a new HDD in my HTPC and I don't want to format. What software do you guys like / use / recommend to do this?

About 5 years ago, I used a piece of software that copied files directly from one drive to another and it worked awesome. That is what I'm looking for. I know Ghost will do what I need, but I don't really feel like creating an image then restoring the image. Rather just go drive to drive.

Any recommendations or suggestions? tia.
 
true image is great, and the demo is full featured so you can use it to do just what your looking for for a one time shot.
 
call me old fashioned, and i appreciate the developments in apps like these, but a fresh OS install is a small price to pay when we all wish we had time for a reformat.

you're right on the doorstep...just bite it.
 
BuudWeizErr said:
I know Ghost will do what I need, but I don't really feel like creating an image then restoring the image. Rather just go drive to drive.
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I love it when people dismiss the best product available because they didn't bother to read anything on it. What makes you think Ghost can't go drive to drive?
 
djnes said:
I love it when people dismiss the best product available because they didn't bother to read anything on it. What makes you think Ghost can't go drive to drive?
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i love it when people overly generalize.

assuming I didn't know that it could do drive to drive, why would I need Ghost? Ghost has way more functionality than I need. I know it's capabilities, I use Ghost at work. I've built multinic boot CD's for Ghost including USB CDROM's. You may or may not know that Norton does not support CD's for booting to the Ghost GUI.

Aside from that, the home version of Ghost is $70, maybe I'm not looking to surf the juarez wave here either. The two links that Crimandevil are freeware (thanks for the links, appreciated++). All I want was a small simple app that will copy directly drive to drive.

so please... keep your useless comments to yourself or move to genmay.
thank you.
 
Hmmm...so I correct an error in your post, and then you get defensive...WOW. If you used Ghost at work, you would have known you didn't need to make an image and then restore it, and wouldn't have made the comments you did.
BuudWeizErr said:
You may or may not know that Norton does not support CD's for booting to the Ghost GUI.
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So then take the ghost.exe file and put it in a thumb drive if you so desire. Furthermore, if it wasn't supported, would they have how-to's on their website explaining how to do this? :rolleyes:
 
BuudWeizErr said:
Any recommendations or suggestions? tia.
Click to expand...

Most drives either come with software or have downloadable software that will do what you want.
 
I was told you can't copy Windows and just to reinstall... :( hooray for bad help lol.
 
ghost lets you do disk to disk easily. ghost32.exe is easily found with google. should it be free though? who knows?

acronis also does. gotta love the full version with every nic i have already built in and SMB access. but the safe version allows for easy disk > disk clone

xxcopy and g4u are both free but i have never had luck copying windows installs to different sized drives.

got em all built into what started as the UBCD. personally i love acronis out of all of them. I guess i wouldn't trust a program that makes a copy of an OS install from within the OS (thats at least how it looks like it works)
 
as mentioned Ghost will clone
you dont have to image with it

freeware alternatives require a learning curve generally
you could do it from Knoppix, g4u, or the various freeware aps on the Ultimate Boot CD
(dont use XXCopy it only clones WinX not W2K or XP)
since your going "up" in size you just need a rudimentary cloning ap

many HDD manufacturer's diagnostic suites also include the ability

personally I use ghost from a FDD
while cloning or backing up from inside the OS has some advantages, its simply another level of complexity to screwup, especially if your running as many primary partitions* and preboot applications as I do (BlueCon + O&O Defrag pre-boot)

http://ghost.radified.com/
http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/26270
http://www.williamaford.com/CloningaHDD.php


* Ghost and very likely other clone applications running from inside the OS need to exit the OS and reboot to DOS (G4U\Knoppix employ a BSD instead the filesystem employed is independent of the filesystem being cloned) inorder to clone or image the system partition\MBR\bootsector. The instructions need to be written to the boot sector. If too many partition descriptions, a boot manager, or preboot aps are present there may not be room for these instructions and youll get a warning. well at least in Ghost you do. This is very likely the case with Acronis as well. By booting to a CD, FDD or Flash Drive instead you avoid all that.and input your desired actions directly into memory.

http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/pub/doc/suse/sles9/adminguide-sles9/ch08.html
http://www.geocities.com/thestarman3/asm/mbr/NTFSBR.htm
http://jayroos.com/tech/tips.php?ID=9
http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/
 
sitheris said:
Acronis True Image.

Discussion closed :D
Click to expand...

I like True Image too. But for one disk it isn't worth the $50, there are free alternatives
 
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