Norton Ghost

[Kibbo]

Hi all.

I'm going to buy myself one of those pretty little Raptors I see in the window of my local hardware store. Right now I have a 40 gig IDE drive on an Abit IC7. Windows XP SP1 for OS.

My overall goal is to transfer my C: drive and my G: (games) drive over to the raptor, leaving my storage partition (hopefully) intact on my old drive. Then use the rest of the space on the old one for more storage.

Questions:
Will moving Windows from IDE over to SATA require a reinstall or repair?
Will all my exe files still be able to find the right paths?
Will windows be able to find all my drivers etc?
Is Norton the best Ghosting program available? Easy to use?
Is there a (legal) way to get a free or trial copy of it or a comparable program?
Apart from data backup, is there anything I need to keep in mind?

 

[Kibbo]

Bueller? Bueller?

 

[geologist]

You should be able to do this easily with an image of your old drive/partitions. I would strongly urge you to spend $50 on a program called Acronis TrueImage. I have ver 7.0, but 8.0 was just released. Unfortunately, their downloadable trial isnt fully functional. This is a simple, easy to use, yet powerful drive imaging program that has saved my butt on more than one occasion. The thing I like about it is that you can image your drive from within windows. I know many people question that this can be done without producing errors, but I can attest that it really works and is a solid program. Besides, if you want, you can create a boot cd and run the entire program from the cd and image your drive outside of windows (I think the cd version of the program is Linux-based)

Another advantage is that you can resize your images, which means you can restore them to a different sized partition than they were originally created from. The only requirement is that you have to have a second drive/partition to store the image, or, you can span the image onto cds or dvds. If you have only the OS and programs on your active partition, it should fit on one dvd. Another nice feature is that when I boot the program from the cd, it recognizes my external USB/firewire drive. At first I had significant problems getting the program to create a boot cd and discovered that norton antivirus was interfereing, so I disabled it and made the boot cd flawlessly

 

[Kibbo]

Thanks Geologist.

Questions:

When you run the program off the cd, is it fairly easy ot use? My skills with linux are limited.

Also, what exactly do you mean when you say you need a partition on which to store the image? If I have both drives installed in my comp, can I just transfer my system partition from one to the other?

 

[ss284]

Maxtor/WD usually include software to do exactly what you plan to do. I've done it with both of their software suites, and had no problems.

A warning though, after the image is done, shut down the computer, and be sure to remove your original drive, and set your bios settings to boot from intel ichr5 sata.



-Steve

 

[Kibbo]

Originally posted by: ss284
Maxtor/WD usually include software to do exactly what you plan to do. I've done it with both of their software suites, and had no problems.

A warning though, after the image is done, shut down the computer, and be sure to remove your original drive, and set your bios settings to boot from intel ichr5 sata.



-Steve

Cool, thanks for that last tip. Removing the drive is exactly the sort of thing I would forget to do.