Thread: Ghost / Imaging

The great thing about having two drives is that you can try it out without sacrificing anything. Get one that runs from dos rather than from windows.

Cheers
Simon

put the drive in and get it started as a slave drive, partition and format it as a bootable drive then reboot the computer to dos mode on the original hard drive

do the Xcopy thing for one drive to the other

turn off the pc, put the new drive in the master boot position and boot it up..

Thats how Ive done it in the past, not sure how its going to work with vista but it works up to XP.

Originally Posted by Blknight.aus

put the drive in and get it started as a slave drive, partition and format it as a bootable drive then reboot the computer to dos mode on the original hard drive

do the Xcopy thing for one drive to the other

turn off the pc, put the new drive in the master boot position and boot it up..

Thats how Ive done it in the past, not sure how its going to work with vista but it works up to XP.

Looks like Xcopy is dead in Vista, replaced with Robocopy. I'll do some research but with a quick look it seems to be the way to go.

Thanks.

doing another as we speak NM,,,

happy to do this one though


have lost 70 gb somewhere

Originally Posted by Numpty's Missus

Don't be such a woose (RON...how do you spell woose?)
Do a full reinstall
Any bugs previously in place will be gone...a nice clean slate...things will work nicely...all the files will play together happily ( hopefully)

The only thing I hate about doing full reinstalls is the time it takes. But you do it bit by bit as you need the stuff.

Yep, I'm a woose! The time, the settings to remember, all the upgrades to reinstall, the pressure from SWMBO, finding all the missing files (her's) that were not put where they were supposed to have been

copys still there and I think its got the same switching as copy had in 6.22 so you can do copy *.* /s and get all the files and subdirectories. (unless microsoft considered that a practical idea and scrapped it, dont be surprised) Im pretty sure it wont copy the attributes of the files or the system files (thems the hidden ones that should be installed when you format a drive as a bootable system disk (format x: /sys(tem))).

A ghost image gives you a restore/backup of your entire system that can get you up and running in about ten minutes.

Backup is a very good idea.

System back up in under an hour compared to six plus hours minimum to clean install, find all the drivers, reinstall all the software...

And you can test it to make sure you did it right.

And, if you're worried about ghosting disk B to disk A, rather than the other way round, you have your DVD/CDs.

I like to have the disk with my data on it sitting in my hand not connected to anything when I'm transferring that much stuff, just to be sure.

Cheers
Simon

DriveImageXML would be my pick. Its free and can do a drive to drive copy quite easily. Its also useful for backing up entire drives to XML files.

The trick with it is to use BartPE which is Windows XP on a CD to run DriveImageXML - see this page for details.

Copying the files only from one hard drive to another won't work as you will not copy the BootLoader which is critical to starting the OS.