Best way to migrate windows across drives?

E

Eva_Unit_0

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jun 1, 2005
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Okay, here's the scenario. My girlfriend's computer's main drive is an old 120 GB seagate. It's starting to make some odd noises and hdtach performance is somewhat erratic across the drive. I'm starting to worry about the drive's health. SMART says its fine, but we all know that doesn't mean much. I want to get her a new system drive.

However, she REALLY doesn't want to reformat her machine. She has it all set up the way she likes it, and besides, the XP installation is still in good shape and well-maintained. Is it possible to image the current disk and restore the image to a new hard drive? My initial thought was Norton Ghost, but I was unsure about if you could restore a ghost image to a hard drive of a different size (surely I would get something bigger than 120 gigs now).

My other thought was to fire up a linux livecd and dd one drive to the other, but this wouldn't do the mbr or bootsector so I guess I'd have to boot the windows cd and run fixboot and fixmbr?

I just don't know the best way to do this. Any advice, oh great [H] gods?


EDIT: I just wanted to clarify something: no other hardware will change. I'm not changing motherboards or anything, so that's not an issue. The only thing that needs to change is the hard drive.
 
Acronis, an amazing tool. Can plug both hard drives in and boot to an Acronis boot disk, clone the drives right there using the 'Proportional' method and I suggest hitting 'Keep Data on old drive' just to make sure it all works ok.

Then just plug in new drive, and your good to go. All should take less than an hour.
 
Easius said:
Acronis, an amazing tool. Can plug both hard drives in and boot to an Acronis boot disk, clone the drives right there using the 'Proportional' method and I suggest hitting 'Keep Data on old drive' just to make sure it all works ok.

Then just plug in new drive, and your good to go. All should take less than an hour.
Click to expand...

ah, that looks great. Exactly what I needed. When I get the new drive I'll post back here how it went.
 
+1 for acronis, i use it at work all the time, awesome tool.
 
[LYL]Homer;1033838755 said:
1. Windows Home Server
2. Acronis
Click to expand...

out of curiosity, how does Windows Home Server factor into this? Does it do some sort of networked image backup or something?
 
The drive is backed up to the WHS box as part of the normal routine. Pull out the old drive, put in new drive and WHS connector software disc, boot from disc (it will look for the WHS box on the network) and it will ask if you are restoring the client, it then asks you to chose which backup to restore, and then let it run. I restored a 200gb drive over 100mbit in about 2.5 hours.

I put WHS over Acronis (which is a great program) for 2 reasons:

1. To highlight that WHS can do this.
2. For many users only having to swap one drive will be easier than hooking the new drive temporarily, transferring the data via Acronis or other, then swapping the two drives.

Of course having WHS available to do this is key. ;)
 
[LYL]Homer;1033841393 said:
The drive is backed up to the WHS box as part of the normal routine. Pull out the old drive, put in new drive and WHS connector software disc, boot from disc (it will look for the WHS box on the network) and it will ask if you are restoring the client, it then asks you to chose which backup to restore, and then let it run. I restored a 200gb drive over 100mbit in about 2.5 hours.

I put WHS over Acronis (which is a great program) for 2 reasons:

1. To highlight that WHS can do this.
2. For many users only having to swap one drive will be easier than hooking the new drive temporarily, transferring the data via Acronis or other, then swapping the two drives.

Of course having WHS available to do this is key. ;)
Click to expand...

Ah, I see. That's a pretty neat feature. My server runs linux so I'm not too familiar with the features of WHS. That's pretty awesome though.

I have a drive ordered now (samsung spinpoint 640GB. I considered the WD green, but since this will be an OS drive, I opted for the performance of the spinpoint) and when it comes I'm going to do the following:
1. Try the clone using Clonezilla, since it should be able to do this and its free/open source. I've read about ways to make it work with dd as well, but it looks like its a pain in the butt.
2. If that doesn't work, I'll pony up the cash for Acronis.
3. If that doesn't work, I'll see if anyone I know has WHS? haha

One other question: What state should the new drive be in when I image it? Should I format it to an NTFS partition? Should I make a blank partition? Or should I just do nothing at all? Does it matter?

Thanks for the advice guys
 
Last time I tested Acronis TI to restore an image, there was a problem with the MBR and Vista bootloader, and it was a known issue. Has this been fixed yet?
 
I wanted to update this thread:

I used hdclone free edition to copy the disk and it worked great. The free version is limited to 5 MB/s transfer speed so I certainly would pony up money for something like Acronis or the paid hdclone if I was going to be doing this on a regular basis. But for a one-time emergency like this the free version was fine. It was insanely easy to use too.

EDIT: in case anyone is wondering, the reason I used hdclone is because it's on Ultimate Boot CD (which I already had a copy of) and it just happened to be the first one that I tried :p
 
MrCrispy said:
Last time I tested Acronis TI to restore an image, there was a problem with the MBR and Vista bootloader, and it was a known issue. Has this been fixed yet?
Click to expand...

I use acronis to clone at work all the time, even on Vista, there are occasional problems with it screwing the MBR on vista, just putting in a vista boot disk and having it do it's startup repair always seems to fix the problem.
 
Could I use Arconis to take 2, 250gb HD's in Raid 0, and put them both onto a single drive that is larger then 500gb?

Arconis isn't free right? =\
 
MightyDiomed said:
Could I use Arconis to take 2, 250gb HD's in Raid 0, and put them both onto a single drive that is larger then 500gb?

Arconis isn't free right? =\
Click to expand...

Yes Acronis can do raid back up and a proportional back up to a larger drive, although if your raid controller is not supported then the boot disk won't work, you will have to install Acronis in windows first and then begin the clone.
 
if it's a seagate drive, you could have just gone to seagate's website and download seagate's discwizard, it's basically a stripped down version of acronis that allows you functions like mirroring the system drive to a new hdd.
 
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