Getting a drive image from one drive to another

Copper · Post by **Copper** » Tue Aug 21, 2007 6:56 am

Suppose you just purchased a second hand notebook computer. It came with Windows 2000 preinstalled, but no installation CD. Suppose you wanted to keep Windows 2000 and wanted to upgrade the hard drive, but the computer doesn't have any hook up for a second drive.

Can a drive be imaged to DVD then a new drive installed and then imaged back from DVD to the new drive? I think what I need is a DOS based drive imaging utility compatable with a DVD drive. Any such thing exist?

Copper · Post by **Copper** » Tue Aug 21, 2007 6:58 am

As an alternative, does Windows 2000 store its installation setup files within itself, like Windows ME, that I could could just copy to CD and reinstall Windows 2000 fresh?

flyingsherpa · Post by **flyingsherpa** » Tue Aug 21, 2007 7:36 am

Norton Ghost can help you here. You can clone one disk to another (if you have a desktop and some laptop HD adaptors, then this would work) or you can save a partition image to DVD and reload to another drive, as long as the partition size will fit onto the DVD of course. I've used it several times and it works well, though I did have a problem once getting it to burn the image directly to a CD... I ended up having to do it directly to another hard drive.

You used to be able to get it cheap on ebay as part of Norton Systemworks, though I don't know if that is still the case.

Copper · Post by **Copper** » Tue Aug 21, 2007 11:43 am

I guess I may have a problem. The drive is 60 GB. It only contains about 800 MB, less page file.

bkh · Post by **bkh** » Tue Aug 21, 2007 11:54 am

Acronis TrueImage is an alternative to Norton Ghost. They have a time-limited but (I think) full-function trial version available from www.acronis.com. In addition to various kinds of backups, this software can clone a hard disk, resizing partitions to fit a larger or smaller destination disk. And the disks can be IDE, SATA, USB, ....

It works for me.

flyingsherpa · Post by **flyingsherpa** » Tue Aug 21, 2007 3:21 pm

Copper wrote:I guess I may have a problem. The drive is 60 GB. It only contains about 800 MB, less page file.

You can Ghost that as a partition to DVD, but you couldn't do a clone operation without a way to hook both hard drives up to a pc. Partition image sizes are only as big as the data on there, while clone sizes are the size of the whole disk.

Copper · Post by **Copper** » Tue Aug 21, 2007 3:29 pm

If I ghost to the DVD and then restore it to the new drive would the new drive have all the boot sector info and such? And does ghosting provide a means of booting the computer off floppy or cd so that the new raw drive could be connected and restored to from dvd?

In essence I'd need to boot my computer with drive with windows 2000 installed, ghost to dvd, shut down computer, switch hard drives to new raw drive, boot off floppy or cd, use ghost floppy or cd tool to restore from dvd to new raw drive, then boot with newly restored drive. Doable?

If doable, should I anticipate needing a separate utility like Windows fdisk and format to create and format partions on the new drive before restore can be performed?

Bluefront · Post by **Bluefront** » Wed Aug 22, 2007 2:43 am

FWIW.....I've used Drive Image 7.0 for this exact operation on laptops and other PCs many times. It comes with a bootable CD......which allows restoring an image from many devices. I almost always back up the "C" drive on a second partition, and on an external USB drive. If the main system drive fails, you simply replace the drive, boot from the Drive Image CD, and restore the image to your new drive which you have saved on the USB drive. Easy operation.....works for me.

Copper · Post by **Copper** » Wed Aug 22, 2007 7:12 am

Thanks guys. Looks like I'll be able to replace the drive.

mimwdv · Post by **mimwdv** » Thu Aug 23, 2007 4:27 pm

Any way of hooking up an external drive housing to your notebook to hold the new drive temporarily? Then you could ghost or whatever straight from one drive to the other, swap them over, and reboot.

JoeWPgh · Post by **JoeWPgh** » Thu Aug 23, 2007 9:29 pm

I ran across this while surfing, but haven't tried it yet for migrating a Windows install. I did use it to prep a drive that Vista wouldn't install to. All you need is access to a Vista install disk. (No - You won't actually install Vista.)Be sure to read through the comments too.
http://geekswithblogs.net/lorint/archiv ... 00596.aspx

seemingly.random · Post by **seemingly.random** » Thu Aug 23, 2007 10:26 pm

There could be partition table issues with the upgraded drive. The first release of w2k only recognizes the first 128gb on a drive (and merrily truncates any existing partitions past that).

If this is a legit copy of w2k, it would be worth contacting MS for a disk replacement. They might even have one with an sp applied that recognizes >128GB. But it would be nice to know if what has been proposed works though.

jhhoffma · Post by **jhhoffma** » Fri Aug 24, 2007 6:42 am

When I upgraded my HTPC to a WD5000KS, the drive came with a utility that allowed me to copy everything from my old drive to the new one. I thought I would give it a shot (nothing to lose, and I didn't want to start from scratch, plus go through and backup all my xvids). It actually worked very well. I've used Partition Magic and stuff in the past and found tools like that end up nuking the partition more often than not, but this worked very well. The only problem I had was that one of the files was corrupted, but a ScanDisk and Defrag fixed that. It's been running for 8 months now with no issues.

Good to see bundled software isn't always useless.

Copper · Post by **Copper** » Fri Aug 24, 2007 7:11 pm

The W2K is a legit copy as far as I know. It has the COA sticker on the bottom. I bought the computer from geeks.com, used. Comes with the OS installed, but no CD.

I had hoped to upgrade to an SSD, but after installing a SuperTalent SATA SSD in my other laptop I don't think I'll bother. The performance really sucks. Installing XP took forever and now the computer is just dogged. $300 wasted.

Back in with the other drive. I have an SATA SSD 8 GB forsale.

seemingly.random · Post by **seemingly.random** » Sat Aug 25, 2007 12:00 am

All might not be lost - it's probably starved for ram - might find a cheap upgrade. I have a 500mhz p3 pc with w2k and 384mb ram. It's a functional web browser.

An alternative is linux. I hear that older machines (as far back as 386) operate quite acceptably with older distros.

Copper · Post by **Copper** » Sat Aug 25, 2007 2:29 pm

I wish it was an OS issue, but unfortunately it's the new SSD drive that cost me $300.00 . The original drive was much faster. I don't want to make the same mistake with another computer.

From what I've read some SSD's are pretty darn fast, but they also cost a heck of a lot more than $300.00. So for now I'll just stick with the drive that's in it. I guess I had hoped the limited read and write speads of the less expensive SSD would be offset by the very fast access speeds. I was wrong.

sea2stars · Post by **sea2stars** » Sat Aug 25, 2007 7:23 pm

Late to the game, but I've used Drive Image 7 also numerous times. I don't think it actually exists anymore though; Symantec absorbed it years ago. I found this when I decided to check for updates for the program. It was the basis for the Norton Ghost package. *chuckle* Symantec bought Ghost out too back in the day.

peteamer · Post by **peteamer** » Fri Sep 14, 2007 10:15 am

Another alternative for anyone [shock] using the search function [/shock] is R-Drive Image.

There is a fully functional 15 day trial version.

I'm currently using it on my laptop to copy the C-Drive to a new larger drive living on a USB connection...

Will report if there are any problems.

Pete

tyran · Post by **tyran** » Fri Sep 14, 2007 12:59 pm

Another imaging utility is "g4u"; it is free and available from sourceforge
It has network push/pull and disk to disk capabilities; if using a laptop, it can work over a usb 2.0 link with an sata/ide-to-usb cable, available from n*wegg or elsewhere.

It creates a bit level copy, so the only thing it can't do is copy a larger partition to a smaller one!