Hard Drive Transfer

Going to slave a second drive in order to transfer my data from my slowly failing primary. I want to do a complete operating system, programs, settings transfer. My question to you guys is...what's the best and most painless way to do it?

What OS? If it is XP, Ntbackup works pretty well....

Depends on what HD you have, but some of the manufacturers have programs on the setup floppy disk to make exact copies of your existing drive to the new one, as if you intend to replace the old with the new. Another option is Norton Ghost.

I would use Drive Image 2002 or Drive Image 7 if You running Win XP/2000 ,
using this software you can create easily images and set it as bootable partition

Ghost 2003 all the way. I have a work system with two HDDs, the 2nd one is primarily to back up the first one each week. Ghost 2003 does it fast and painlessly. And what's better is you set the back up parameters in Windows, hit 'run now' and it reboots to DOS and begins the process, finishes it, and reboots back to Windows automatically. Ever have a problem with 1st HDD or replace it, simply use the Ghost Boot Disk and copy back. Bada Bing, done deal.

The Western Digital Lifeguard is OK, but no way is it as good as Ghost, nor does it do the same things. I recently replaced my 2nd HDD with a bigger one. I tried using the Western Digital utility to copy the contents of my existing 2nd HDD to the new one and I had problems. For some reason the Western Digital utility said it detected Windows NT on the drive. There is no OS on this second drive (XP Pro on the first drive and that's it). Because of this and that's it's NTFS, the only option I had was to partition this new drive into 4 gig partitions (would not set it any higher because it was mistakenly setting it up for NT. Needless to say I got the hell out of there and then used Ghost to do it. Ghost did not have any problems copying the drive.

I'm not saying the Western Digital utility is bad (I have used it before) but in no way does it replace Ghost.

Mike89 said:

The Western Digital Lifeguard is OK, but no way is it as good as Ghost, nor does it do the same things. I recently replaced my 2nd HDD with a bigger one. I tried using the Western Digital utility to copy the contents of my existing 2nd HDD to the new one and I had problems. For some reason the Western Digital utility said it detected Windows NT on the drive. There is no OS on this second drive (XP Pro on the first drive and that's it). Because of this and that's it's NTFS, the only option I had was to partition this new drive into 4 gig partitions (would not set it any higher because it was mistakenly setting it up for NT. Needless to say I got the hell out of there and then used Ghost to do it. Ghost did not have any problems copying the drive.

I'm not saying the Western Digital utility is bad (I have used it before) but in no way does it replace Ghost.

Click to expand...

just for future reference, western digital just upgraded their software. they added some great features in their new software and they don't have that ntfs problem like you mentioned (i ran into that before as well). they can even add boot from cd-rom support which definitely made my life easier when i just installed win2k on my aunt's old rig that didn't support boot from cd...