cloning hard drives

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tonester

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Hi:

I am planning on upgrading one of my hard drives. Presently, I have as my C drive, a 9G, which conatins programs, WinMe, system stuff, etc. My d drive is a 30G for Audio. I have Norton Ghost to clone the 9G to the 30G.
I would like to use the 30G as the C drive, for programs, etc (upgrading to Win XP), and temporarily use the 9G as D drive until I get a 7200 RPM 40 G hard drive for audio.
Is it as simple as switching the hard drives, switching the master-slave configuration, and assigning the drive letters, or am I missing something?
I need to ask before attempting this.
Thanks in advance,

Tony
 
If you're reinstalling Windows, it's that simple.

Also, don't upgrade to XP, reinstall XP from scratch. Windows upgrades never work.
 
The Win XP upgrade is amazingly good actually but still a fresh install is much more preferable.

NB many XP CDs (esp the commercially released upgrades, trial versions), including bootlegged versions are NOT designed to let you install from scratch!!! It cannot be done. The installer is a windows program itslf so if you don't have windows installed you're screwed.

Do what I have done; format drives and setup partitions as you like then install Win 98 but don't bother to install any drivers etc. Immediately after installation use the Win XP upgrade CD and then setup your system to taste. It's probably more reliable and faster that way.

But hey if you have managed to somehow get one of the CDs that are for "new PCs only" then good on you!;)
 
Actually it's easy to do a fresh install of XP with an upgrade CD. You do need a computer that boots of of the CD-ROM though.

Assuming a fresh install... format c: /u/q

Go into BIOS make sure it's going to even look at the cd-rom - boot sequence CD-ROM, A, C etc... whatever you get the picture.

Boot off the upgrade disk, you will be prompted to insert a microsoft OS, i.e. 98 (you should have one of these, right?).

Then proceed to do your fresh install.

Easy.
 
Too Late! I already installed Win XP upgrade. The only things that didn't work were my Midisport 2X2. my Frontier Dakota, and my Easy CD creator 5.
wait a minute....these are the reasons I use my Computer!!!!!

I re-installed the updated drivers and everything works fine. It even lowered my latency in SONAR XL.

assuming I am going to clone, do I still need to re-install Windows?

Tnaks,
T
 
To answer you original question, yes using Ghost is pretty simple. You don't say how much stuff you have on your drives, that will make a difference how you run Ghost. If you are running XP you will want to veify that your version of Ghost is compatible with whatever file system you are using, to my best knowlage it should work fine. You will also want to make a Ghost boot floppy first, with real-mode CDROM drivers, which may be impossible to do now that you have installed XP. Hopefully you have one left over.

Ghost can write out a hard drive image to a file, or do a direct disk-to-disk copy. So here are your options:

If you can clean off your 30 gig completely, boot your PC from floppy, run Ghost, do a direct copy 9 gig to 30 gig. Then shut down PC, adjust drive jumpers, and you are done. You will probably want to re-format your 9 gig as a temporary data drive until your 40 shows up.

If you cant completely clear off your 30 gig its gets more complicated. Ghost can write an image to a file. With compression set to "high" you will get a file between 50-80% the size of the original total drive files. So if (for example) you have 3 gigs of files on your 9 gig, it will probably write about a 2 gig file. You can write this to your 30. Then you could (if it all fits) boot from a floppy, re-format your 9 gig, copy the image file and all data from the 30 back to the 9, and then use Ghost to write the image file to the 30. Then re-jumper the drives.

If you have a CDR burner, the best solution is as follows:
1. Boot up from a floppy
2. Rub Ghost from floppy, with the following parameters:
Ghost -span -split=620 -auto
This will tell Ghost to break the image file into 620 meg pieces (which actually turn out to be about 640 megs).
3. When done, write the image files out to CDRs
4. The you can format the 9 gig, move the data from the 30 gig to the 9 gig , and then install the Ghost image onto the 30 from your CD image(s).

I should mention that although I have run Ghost from a DOS window running inside Win 98, and have cloned systems that way, Symantec strongly recomends that you Ghost systems from a (DOS) boot floppy, as this guarentees that all OS files are closed and stable. I dont know if Ghost will even run in a window under XP.

Good Luck....
 
Thanks RW:

.........shows how little I know about computers. I should be able to get all stuff off my 30G drive, because it is 4G worth of audio files. i'm just going to burn these to a CDR.
Should I format the 30G before attempting Ghost?
I know you mentioned the XP-Ghost 2001 compatiblity issue, but I was able to install it as well as create a boot disk. So maybe it will work?.......................

Thanks for the advice,

Tony.

PS Someone on another NG also mentioned XCopy. Is that built into WinXP, or is it a Dos prompt?
 
Xcopy, and Xcopy32, and run from the command prompt (formerly DOS window). They first appeared in Windows 95, and I'd be stunned if they didn't still exist in XP.

Ghost (and I should say that I use verison 5.1D) will overwrite any partition information and leave any extra space as blank formated area. So no you don't need to format the drive. However if you have any doubts about the drive its a good idea to format it anyay, because a format will find any bad sectors. Ghost doen't react well to bad sectors, it usually just tanks.

If Ghost 2001 installed OK on XP I wouldn't worry about it. The main thing is that it has to be able to read and write the file system. As far as I am aware, there have been no changes to the FAT32 or NTFS file systems in XP from previous versions.

As you will soon find out, Ghost is damn handy thing to have arround. About every 3-4 months (or after any major overhaul) I Ghost my system drive, writing to 640 meg files on my data drive. I then write them to CDR. That way if my system drive totally dies, I can pop in a new drive, boot from a floppy with CD driver, and literally be 100% recovered in a few minutes. Its a beautiful thing....
 
To update:

I successfully Ghosted the one hard drive to the other. not a hitch!!!

Now..........I want to switch those hard drives. They don't have markings on them designating which is Master and Slave, like on my DVD-Rom and CD burner.,just the jumpers. Being two different manufacturers, the pins are a little different also. I can probably dig up the info on the 30G Maxtor, to make that the Master, but the 9G, which came with the computer, may be a little more difficult. Any tips?

Thanks,

Tony
 
I had another thought: If both hard drives are on separate ribbon cables, then they aren't in a Master-Slave config, right?
This is the way I have them set up. Does this mean I can simply change the Drive letter, since the drives are exact copies of one another.

Tony
 
Jumpering depends on the drive manufacturer. Historically, Maxtor drive have one setting for master OR single drive, and another for slave. But Western Digital have three different settings for single, master, or slave. If you can find the brand of the hard drive, most manufacturers have web sites that give jumper settings. Regarding Maxtor, most of their drives have one jumper marker "J50" which is key, jumper it ON for master/single, jumper OFF for slave. But this may not hold true for the newer drives, you will just have to check.

Usually the boot drive of a system has to be a master or single drive, you cant boot from a slave IDE drive.

Another thing to remember, with older IDE drives it didnt matter where on the IDE ribbon cable you put the drive, but the newer ATA 66/100 drives want the master drive on the END of the cable.
 
Not to wear you out, but I tried an experiment. I disconnected the 9 gig's cable and power supply, and tried to start the computer using only the 30G. It started to load, but only got as far as the blue Windows XP screen. Nothing further. This leads me to believe that something critical was left out in the Ghost process. I will try it again.

Tony
 
Not to wear you out, but I tried an experiment. I disconnected the 9Gig's cable and power supply, and removed the cable from the PCI slot. I booted up WinXP with the 30G only. I got as far as the blue WinXp welcome screen, and no further.

This leads me to believe that something critical was left out in the Ghost process, maybe? Shoudln't I be able to run the cloned hard drive on it's own?

By the way, the jumpers ar set for Master on the 30G.
Thanks,

Tony
 
Hmmm.... there is one other possibe issue. Now, on older motherboards after you would swap drives between controllers you would need to go into the BIOS and run what was called IDE Autodetect, so the right values (size) for each drive would be loaded for each of your controllers (Primary master/slave, secondary master/slave)
On newer systems the hard drive values usually default to an "auto" setting, meaning it autodetects the drive every time you boot up and loads the right values. So there should be no issue.
You might want to check the BIOS, and run the autodetect and see if it is finding the right values for the drive. Other than that, there should be no problem, Ghost is usually pretty fool proof. Of course I have never tried it with XP, but assuming the file system is the same it shouldn't matter.

One thing - Ghost will not transfer a swap file, so if you have a set swap file, you will sometimes get an error the first time you boot due to this. But with Win98 the system will just go ahead and rebuild the file. With XP... as Spock would say, "unknown Captain".
 
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