Need to swap HD without reinstall?

J

jimnms

Gawd
Joined
Mar 15, 2003
Messages
882
To make a long story short (hopefully), I have two computers. One is my HTPC, the other is my desktop/gaming system. The HTPC had a 60GB Quantom drive that died, and I bought a replacement WD 80GB 7200RPM (8MB Cache) drive to replace it. My desktop/gaming system has the same hard drive in it. I later discovered the 60GB drive that died was still under warranty, and they replaced it with an 80GB 7200RPM Maxtor (8MB Cache).

Now I'm running low on disk space on my main desktop/gaming system. Being somewhat of a profectionist, I'd like to have both identical WD hard drives in the desktop and put the Maxtor in the HTPC. The thing is, I don't want to have to format and reinstall everything on the HTPC. What's the easiest way to do this?
 
Not gonna spend $70 for something I'm going to use once. :eek:

I've looked at Partition Suprise, but it doesn't look like it supports NTFS.
 
jimnms said:
Not gonna spend $70 for something I'm going to use once. :eek:

I've looked at Partition Suprise, but it doesn't look like it supports NTFS.
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I have a copy of norton ghost I can send.

e-mail me at: [email protected]

I have v5.1 that I can give ya. but e-mail me about it and we'll speak more on it.

I won't charge you anything of course
 
Or maybe instead of openly pirating software on message boards you could just use the free DataLifeguard tools from Western Digital that will do exactly as you want?
Here are the tools

Just RTFM before you do anything and you'll be fine.
 
darkmyth said:
I have a copy of norton ghost I can send.

e-mail me at: [email protected]

I have v5.1 that I can give ya. but e-mail me about it and we'll speak more on it.

I won't charge you anything of course
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wow, open piracy... spend the 70 bucks and support the economy....
 
darkmyth said:
I have a copy of norton ghost I can send.

e-mail me at: [email protected]

I have v5.1 that I can give ya. but e-mail me about it and we'll speak more on it.

I won't charge you anything of course
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:eek:

Not on these boards.
 
Or use Bart PE with the xcopy /cherky command. But you will need to sysprep, if you are swapping hardware. (If your just xcopying from one disk to another, you will need to delete the mounteddevices key, before xcopying)

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

And, openly telling people you will pirate. Not very smart. ;)
 
Ranma_Sao said:
Or use Bart PE with the xcopy /cherky command. But you will need to sysprep, if you are swapping hardware. (If your just xcopying from one disk to another, you will need to delete the mounteddevices key, before xcopying)

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

And, openly telling people you will pirate. Not very smart. ;)
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No it's more of a I have norton ghost v5.1 that I bought but don't use and don't need. I would send the disk to him if he wanted it. I don't need the money for it so he wouldn't need to pay me. How is that piracy??
 
Did you read your EULA, or just click ok?

Are you going to e-mail the license with that too?

If you truly want to give it to him, snail mail him the CD+license. Your post is so vague is going to draw criticism because it reaks of piracy.

To correctly sell software you should provide original CD(s)+ the license. That's the only legal part about it, the paper license, NOT the original CD and it's key (if applicable).
 
Phoenix86 said:
Did you read your EULA, or just click ok?

Are you going to e-mail the license with that too?

If you truly want to give it to him, snail mail him the CD+license. Your post is so vague is going to draw criticism because it reaks of piracy.

To correctly sell software you should provide original CD(s)+ the license. That's the only legal part about it, the paper license, NOT the original CD and it's key (if applicable).
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yes i have all of this documentation.

I won't be helping this kid out anymore, or anyone else on this forum for that matter.
It's rediculous to want to help a kid out with swapping info from one hdd to another and you get this amount of criticism without asking for any clarification what so ever on what i was offering.

From this point on this is my last post here, and I have removed all information of mine on here
 
darkmyth said:
No it's more of a I have norton ghost v5.1 that I bought but don't use and don't need. I would send the disk to him if he wanted it. I don't need the money for it so he wouldn't need to pay me. How is that piracy??
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I apologize, if you are still reading this, I jumped to conclusions.
 
darkmyth said:
yes i have all of this documentation.

I won't be helping this kid out anymore, or anyone else on this forum for that matter.
It's rediculous to want to help a kid out with swapping info from one hdd to another and you get this amount of criticism without asking for any clarification what so ever on what i was offering.

From this point on this is my last post here, and I have removed all information of mine on here
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Well, that's certianly your choice.Your original post is so vague it could have gotten the thread locked before clarification was ever presented.

Sorry, but 99% of anyone on a technical forum will read your post as an offer for piracy, as the replies indicate.
 
If I wanted pirated software I would have gone to Kazaa or something. I was more looking along the lines of something opensource/gpl/freeware etc. I saw the WD Data Life Guard software, but the description didn't sound like it was what I needed. I'll play with it though. How is it going to like me transfering things from a WD HD to a Maxtor HD?
 
Ahh yes, back to the subject... I have not seen opensource projects near completion on this front, but I have seen retail drives come with some software to do the job. Let me check on that WD data life guard, I'll post back shortly.

edit: interesting, I didn't know they had this feature in the life guard tools
"Improved drive to drive copy capability"

I'm downloading and looking at the tools now.

edit2: OK even more intersting, it's looking like it's copying to a maxtor drive, but it's slow... I started about 30 minutes ago and it's at 20% of ~4GB of data on a 20gb partition to a 40gb partition.
 
jimnms said:
If I wanted pirated software I would have gone to Kazaa or something. I was more looking along the lines of something opensource/gpl/freeware etc. I saw the WD Data Life Guard software, but the description didn't sound like it was what I needed. I'll play with it though. How is it going to like me transfering things from a WD HD to a Maxtor HD?
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The data lifeguard tools are actually a bundle of different utilities, I should have mentioned that. Included is the drive copy utility. I used it to copy from a Deathstar to a WD drive. It's a nice simple utility, specifically designed for what you're trying to do.
 
Use whatever you want, but xcopy /cherky is the best solution I know of. ;) (From one who tests this scenario at least once a week.)
 
OK, the partition copy works just fine, even if there is no WD HDD involved. ;) It's just very slow, took over on hour for the data set above.

Ranma_Sao, KISS. The data life guard tools will do exactlly what he needs, it has a simple partition imaging tool. No extra BS involved, no command prompt, plus it's supported by the drive manuf. so worse case, there is someone to call.
 
Now that we have it confirmed it works... ;) I haven't used the WD tools, but back in the day, they were all based on DOS, and had issues with large disks, etc... (Now maybe a different story, I haven't used WD's disk tools in over 2 years.)
 
You guys could have just listened to me in the first place and saved yourselves some time ;)
 
Ghost 5.1 has issues with NTFS partitions in general. It does not work properly with XP. Only versions 7.1 and 7.5 work right with XP's version of NTFS.

The Data Life Guard tools do have a drive copy utility and although I'm not fond of it, as I prefer Ghost and use Ghost almost everyday at work, the WD tools work fine.
 
Ranma_Sao said:
Now that we have it confirmed it works... ;) I haven't used the WD tools, but back in the day, they were all based on DOS, and had issues with large disks, etc... (Now maybe a different story, I haven't used WD's disk tools in over 2 years.)
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Yeah, I haven't used them in about that long, maybe longer, which is why I was surprised it was part of their toolset. Last time I saw the drive copy finction was on a disk with the drive, seperate of the data life tools. I didn't download and test it for fun. ;)

You guys could have just listened to me in the first place and saved yourselves some time
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So true... :D
 
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