How do I copy my entire PC to another PC?

G

Gary King

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 9, 2004
Messages
313
I want to copy PC #1 hard drives (everything, I have 2 physical drives; drive 1 (60 GB) is partitioned to C, D, and E, and drive 2 (80 GB) is partitioned to I:) to another PC #2, so that I can reformat my PC #1 but I still have everything all backed up and mirrored on another PC.

What's the best way to go about doing this? I checked my Norton Ghost and it says that the 'Copy One Drive to Another' feature does NOT work over networks.

The PC #1 and PC #2 are about 3 meters away from each other, so running a cable between the two shouldn't be a problem, if necessary (but they are also on the same network.)

Thanks in advance! :)
 
Pop the drive out of the new computer, and put it in the old computer. Boot to your Ghost disc or floppy, and ghost it over that way. Unhook the drive and put it in the new computer, and boot it up. I'd follow the sticky at the top in using Sysprep as well.
 
Okay, thanks.

Also, I don't actually have PC #2 yet. What PC should I get? A barebones? Does it even need an O/S, since my PC #1 already has Windows XP Home (legit)?
 
You can use norton ghost over a network too, might save you some swapping time.
 
Don't ever use Ghost inside of Windows, especially if you plan to have it work successfully. Your supposed to create ghost boot disks and do it that way, whether your going from a local disc to a local disc, or across a network.
 
If you believe Symantec, Ghost 9.0 does work from within Windows. It supposedly can image your boot drive even while you are running from it.

Of course, my two tests of that capability resulted in the image being unusable by the Ghost boot floppy when I tried to restore. Imagine that.

Boot from the Ghost floppy and be sure.
 
pbj75 said:
If you believe Symantec, Ghost 9.0 does work from within Windows. It supposedly can image your boot drive even while you are running from it.

Of course, my two tests of that capability resulted in the image being unusable by the Ghost boot floppy when I tried to restore. Imagine that.

Boot from the Ghost floppy and be sure.
Click to expand...

Curious, does Ghost 9.0 use the volume shadow copy provider to do this, or do they use their own open file agent? I'm not a frequent ghost user so this is just an inquiry.
 
pbj75 said:
Of course, my two tests of that capability resulted in the image being unusable by the Ghost boot floppy when I tried to restore. Imagine that.
Click to expand...
I've never been able to make a successful image this way either. I can open the image in Ghost Explorer and extract files, but if I restore it, it's never a go. However, if I image the same drive using ERD Commander in the WinPE environment, it works flawlessly 100% of the time. For this reason, I can't recommend imaging a drive when it's in use.
 
Gary King said:
Okay, thanks.

Also, I don't actually have PC #2 yet. What PC should I get? A barebones? Does it even need an O/S, since my PC #1 already has Windows XP Home (legit)?
Click to expand...
Get whatever PC is appropriate. We can't give you any useful advice beyond that right now.

OS? Depends on your current XP license:

Retail: Fully legal to transfer, but you can't use it on the old system.
OEM: Not legal to transfer. OEM installs are tied to the motherboard they are first installed on, unless you have to replace the motherboard with an identical model.

Search for the recent Windows License info thread for details.
 
I guess i've been lucky with the ghost 9.0 i've sucessfully made images and restored several times inside of windows. I did use the symantec restore cd to restore. maybe thats the difference
 
pbj75 said:
If you believe Symantec, Ghost 9.0 does work from within Windows. It supposedly can image your boot drive even while you are running from it.

Of course, my two tests of that capability resulted in the image being unusable by the Ghost boot floppy when I tried to restore. Imagine that.

Boot from the Ghost floppy and be sure.
Click to expand...

Is there such a thing as a Ghost bootable CD, if I want to build a machine without a floppy?
 
Gary King: You cannot re-use your existing copy of XP on the old PC and the new PC. One PC = one XP license. Buy a second copy. Hey man, Bill Gates gotta eat :)

rcolbert: No idea if they are using the VSS or not. Either way, it doesn't work.

I also don't like how Ghost wants to install itself in the system tray. Definitely prefer the boot floppy and external hard drive approach. Only downside is I can't automate that.
 
Ghost bootable CD? Funny you should ask. I was trying to make one the other night with Nero. Admittedly, I did not try very hard (baseball game was on), but I was not successful.

I should be able to just copy the files off the floppy and mark the CD as bootable. Will have to re-engage. If I am successful, I will post my process.
 
I did use the Ghost Restore CD to try the restore. Told me the image was corrupt.

Of course, the installed Ghost app under XP said the image was fine. Sigh...

If it works for you, great. Makes for easy, incremental backups. Nice feature.

I just hope anyone using it does a test restore to make sure it really is working.
 
I'm certainly no ghost expert, but back in 2002/2003 we rolled about 1,000 laptops to the field in about three weeks time, and used Ghost over the network (in staging areas) to deploy the images. I know that the boot media was CD, so it must be possible. I guess I had assumed all along that CD's were the ghost de facto these days, but again, I don't know much in depth about it.
 
The Ghost wizard gives you options for floppies or CD images. There should be an option to make a bootable CD to create ghost images, and a bootable CD to restore them. I use the latter option on a DVD, with the base ghost image for home uses. Combine that with sysprep and it makes building new machines fairly easy.
 
chronic9 said:
get acronis true image. way better then ghost.
Click to expand...
You should state when your just posting your personal opinion. I've used both, and currently use both in different situations. If I had to use only one, it would surely be Ghost. I've been able to pull images off machines and recover data that Acronis couldn't.
 
i like acronis for its simplicity of use. its nice and pretty in windows and when you boot with its CD. true, that you cant pull EVERYTHING out of a bad image. but that never happened to me yet. i stoped using ghost after it messed up on makeing a mirror image and somehow screwed up my drive that was being copied as well. have been using acronis since then. one that i dont like is the way that it back ups your harddrive, it makes 1 main image which depending on the size of your drive can be quiet large and then makes smaller ones all the time with the added data. if you add up the total size of this collection of images its like 2 - 3 larger then the partition being copied. oh well, i just delete the whole collection of images once a month and start over.

the only product that i like from symantec right now is norton AV corp. 9 its simply my fav. although iam using some other AV on my current box, i cant remember the name though. but its pretty dam good too.
 
pbj75 said:
Ghost bootable CD? Funny you should ask. I was trying to make one the other night with Nero. Admittedly, I did not try very hard (baseball game was on), but I was not successful.

I should be able to just copy the files off the floppy and mark the CD as bootable. Will have to re-engage. If I am successful, I will post my process.
Click to expand...
I had to "modify" the setup to get it working. What issue are you having?

 
chronic9 said:
get acronis true image. way better then ghost.
Click to expand...

My only experiences with Acronis are outdated (as in about a year ago), but my problem with them was they didn't have full support for all the various drive controllers. I had my boot partition on a SATA drive hanging off a Silicon Images RAID controller (built-in to a most Gigabyte motherboards) and the Acronis boot CD would enumerate both physical disks, even though the setup was a RAID 1 mirror. After several hotfixes and no success I gave up on them.

The application looked good, but in my one case the hardware support didn't meet my requirements.
 
I posted my Ghost 9.0 vs Ghost 2003 comments in another thread
linky

As far as a bootable CD, turns out I had a bad floppy.

Created the boot floppy from Ghost 2003.
Ran Nero, chose CD-ROM(boot).
Picked the floppy as the image source. Up comes the compilation window.
Selected all the files and folders and put them onto the CD.
Burned the CD.

CD boots great, right into the standalone Ghost tool for backup and restore.
 
Ghost is great, but I seriously suggest buying a boxed copy of 2003 rather than using a version that may have been bundled with your latest motherboard simply because the manual is much more enlightening than just stumbling through clicking on stuff that looks like it might be what you're after.

I used Ghost when I upgraded to a new pair of hard disks on my raid array. Unfortunately, I only had a CD writer at the time and my data ran across 27CDs (that took more than a 24 hours to back up as I had to go to work during that time!). In short: I Ghosted to CD as a safety net.
Then Ghosted from Raid Channel 0 Master and Raid Channel 1 Master to Raid Channel 0 Slave and Raid Channel 1 Slave to the new disks to copy the data. Without letting Windows boot again, remove the old Masters and move the jumpers on the drives.

Had everything gone tits up, (and I checked this with the aid of a mates identical motherboard) I could have used the CD back up to recover. The first CD boots up ghost and the rest of the discs (including the remainder of disc 1) contain the data.

Once I'd booted up again it was as if nothing had changed apart from the fact that I had A LOT more free space on the drives. Once I was happy that everything was cool, I put the old drives back in the machine and reformatted them for use as a swap volume and back up location.
 
When I bought Ghost 9.0 about 2 months ago, guess what was also in the box. A full copy of Ghost 2003!

Not sure why Symantec is including both Ghost 2003 and Ghost 9.0 in the same box, but I was happy to get both, since Ghost 9.0 does not work for me. On second thought, may be I do know why they have both in the same box.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top