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copy harddrive

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zman

Registered
Joined
Dec 27, 2001
I just added a computer room to my house (lan party room) and I am going to build 3 more systems just like the one below.I'm looking for a program to copy my hard drive so i don't have to install every thing in 3 computers(45 gigs of games & stuff).i'm getting 3 more coa's for win 2000 pro to be legal. and also when in done is there a way to update the hard drives from one computer (install new driver in one they all get the update?)or a program that checks to make sure they are all up to date w/ my computer.
Thanks for your help!!
 
I see problems in what you are trying to do. IMO, Ghost 2003 is the best utility out there for cloning one hard drive to another. But, this is provided it's all on the same computer. If you try to copy a hard drive or partition that contains the OS, on one computer and then try to copy it into another computer, all kinds of problems are going to develop because nothing is going to match (registry, components, etc). And if you try to copy a HDD that does not contain an OS from one computer to another, you are also going to have problems because the computer that you copied to is not going to recognize the apps (because there would be no record in the registry of them ever being installed. The data would be there but you'd still have to re-install everything again to get XP to recognize and provide links to them.

You're going to have no choice but to do each one from scratch (unless the systems were all identical and even then there is going to be problems with XP activation)
 
They will be the identical,down to case fans,keyboard,mouse etc! I was planing on copying the hard drive in one computer then take in out and put in a new one and copy that one and so on.also win 2000 pro so there's no activation. kinda like they do at dell,hp,etc.
just a thought.It would save alot of time.but then again it may think it's the same computer when I go to network them. hmmm.
 
simply download the free software that comes with your hard drive. i know that western digital has software that will allow you to copy and entire hard drive (the entire partition) to a different drive (like for upgrading purposes). that should do it ;)

i don't know what you mean about the whole not having a record in the registry... it should work fine.... the registry is contained in the files that are in the "c:\%windir%\system32\config" directory and are named Default, Sam, Security, Software, and System. it should copy fine...

we ghosted a couple hundred computers for my mom's school and they came with blank hard drives basically (we wiped them out with the ghost image that we perfected).
 
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