Cloning to a bigger drive

[Dennis Gordon]

I have 3 15K SCSI drives in may machine (dual booting XP Pro/XP 64 bit). I recently cloned my 36G C, boot drive to a Fujitsu drive of the same size that is faster and quieter. I used Acronis Migrate Easy. Worked great. My XP64 bit install is on E, which is an 18G Seagate. Very fast drive, but I just picked up a 36G Maxtor Atlas II, and I was thinking of cloning my 64 bit OS to it.

I know you can clone a drive to a larger drive, but do I need to partition the larger drive if it's a system disk? I could just mess around with Acronis, I suppose, but I thought I'd ask here first.

Also, as long as I'm juggling drives around... I was following the thread about moving the page file to another drive. My questions are: given the speed of these SCSI drives, is there any performance gain to be had by such a move, and must it be moved to a separate physical drive rather than a partition? This is a newspaper graphics workstation. Thanks for any help....

3800X2 @ 2.54
1G DDR 400 @ 422
NVS280 Quadro 64 meg
3x 15K U320 HD

 

[djnes]

I'm not a big fan of Acronis, as it's left most of my test images corrupted, but I'm a diehard Ghost fan. I can tell you Ghost will definitely clone to a larger drive. On the screen where you choose the destination drive, it allows you to set the size of the ghosted drive/partition. It's best to leave the destination drive unformatted. I'd be shocked that Acronis didn't have the same functionality, but then again I was shocked at how often it failed or gave a bad image.

 

[Dennis Gordon]

I only used Migrate Easy once, to clone my boot drive, and it worked swell, but I don't use these utilities much so who knows what will happen next time. I'll give it a try and see what happens...