Sata II 300MB

[Chalenge]

I just got a new drive and want to clone my hard drive over rather than reinstall Windows and take two and a half days to get it done. Is there an easy way to do this without spending a ton of money?

[Skuzzy]

Seagate has a utility which does a really good job of this.  However, it only works with Seagate drives.

[rogerdee]

there is  a drive copyer called casper if u are using windows xp,u get  a 30day trial with it as long as u dont want to make a partiction in the new drive it will copy it

[Krusty]

I was on an old IDE driver, and I could understand your comment about 2 days to install windows...

However when I got my Sata (1.5) the drive itself is far FAR faster than the older drive. The interface and the drive itself allowed me to install a FULL version of windows XP in 30 minutes.

I'm not lying. It was, as they say, stupid fast!

[Eagler]

Originally posted by Chalenge
I just got a new drive and want to clone my hard drive over rather than reinstall Windows and take two and a half days to get it done. Is there an easy way to do this without spending a ton of money?

under $20 for norton ghost 9 here:
http://cgi.ebay.com/New-Symantec-Norton-Ghost-9-0_W0QQitemZ7248024957QQihZ015QQcategoryZ51331QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

I used that last month to upgrade the wifes hard drive

[Chalenge]

Forgive me for giving such poor information and thank you for your suggestions so far.

I have a machine running Windows XP X64 and wish to copy the entire old drive over rather than reinstall all the software that is on it. I think it would take less than thirty minutes if it were just windows but it isnt. I havent been able to find any program that could do this with x64. I tried the Maxtor partition copy program but it didnt work and neither did Acronis Migrate Easy. Another problem is that the drives are accessed by embedded controllers. I have an ASUS A8N32 SLI Deluxe if that helps.

[Krusty]

Oh, that makes things a lot more difficult.

So let me ask you all a question here... When you make a ghost, or an image of a drive, so that you can re-format back to that image when you want, how large is it?

Say you got a HD that's using a total of 40GB, and you make a backup image, or whatever.

Is it going to be a 40GB image??

As you might guess I've heard about doing this but never done it myself. How do you store such an image?

[Chalenge]

Its a compressed version of the original but Ghost wont work with X64 or at least its not mentioned as supported. If you know otherwise please fill me in.

[Krusty]

I'm ignorant of all things ghosting. Sorry.

[Silat]

Originally posted by Krusty
Oh, that makes things a lot more difficult.

So let me ask you all a question here... When you make a ghost, or an image of a drive, so that you can re-format back to that image when you want, how large is it?

Say you got a HD that's using a total of 40GB, and you make a backup image, or whatever.

Is it going to be a 40GB image??

As you might guess I've heard about doing this but never done it myself. How do you store such an image?

I use acronis true image to make a mirror image. I store it on a 2nd HD.
It is an image of my clean install with all my programs that I use.
I keep a notepad of any programs I install after the image was made. That way when I need to mirror it back I can spend a half hour installing those programs:)

[Chalenge]

I discovered that True Image Workstation (not Home) does support Windows XP Pro X64 so I bought that. It has a clone function built in and cloning the entire 300GB drive took an hour. Creating the backup image was a thirty minute job. I dont care who you are thats cool!

Thanks for your suggestions!