Copying data from 80gig drive to a new drive.

I know the "best" way to do this would be to install the os, reinstall the programs, then use something like robocopy and throw the old data onto the new drive.

But was thinking there must be something out there that would let me just clone the drive partitions and everything over to the new drive. Something like G-parted but for copying files, folders, partitions right down the sectors so the drive boots up on the computer just as the old one did.

If there was a live CD or something that would do that I would be extremely happy =D
Not to mention if I submitted it to my company and they decided to use it I get a smacker of a bonus =)

anyone got anything? ideas?

what i've tried so far is formatting the new drive to ntfs with g-parted, then robo copied all the files from the old drive over, check disk, then watched the computer not boot up. It gets past bios, but wont ever find the boot sector.

anyway thanks =D

This will copy entire disk over to new hdd.
http://www.acronis.com/

Hardass said:

This will copy entire disk over to new hdd.
http://www.acronis.com/

Click to expand...

I'll have to give that a try. Looks like the same thing as norton ghost though which just creates an image of the drive.

Does this have to be installed on the source drive?

yup.

Acronis® Migrate Easy 7.0
I have it, you can make a CD boot disc and clone from the boot disc and you can use sata and usb and raid 0 cloning.

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/migrateeasy/

Another (free) alternative, is (as long as the new drive is larger than the old) BartPE with DriveImageXML.

Google it and download the tool to create an iso from an XP CD, then it's pretty simple... boot from the CD, open DriveImageXML, clone the drive, power off, remove the old and put the new in it's place, reboot.

I have and use Acronis True Image Home and it's fantastic, but nothing wrong with the other.

with both Acronis and DriveImageXML the target drive has not been bootable. I'm trying DriveImageXML again on sata drives to see if there is a difference. Im thinking that because the target is set up as the slave drive while imaging, when I try to boot it as master its having issues.

Not sure though.

Methal said:

with both Acronis and DriveImageXML the target drive has not been bootable. I'm trying DriveImageXML again on sata drives to see if there is a difference. Im thinking that because the target is set up as the slave drive while imaging, when I try to boot it as master its having issues.

Not sure though.

Click to expand...

Shouldn't have made a difference... did you do the cloning job from a bootable CD or from within windows?

fritzman said:

Shouldn't have made a difference... did you do the cloning job from a bootable CD or from within windows?

Click to expand...

From within windows on my tech computer.

The sata worked well. I copied my C drive to my D, then switched cables and booted from the D..which was now the C i guess. IDE is where the pain is. I spent 8+ hours at work trying to make it work right.

I set the target and source up on a single ide ribbon Then tried to clone the drive which had only 5.8gigs of data. The first didnt work at all and when all was said and done the drive had to be formatted in order for windows to even recognize it. The 2nd try was different, but not so different. The only difference was that it took 5 hours to transfer 5.8gigs of data over. And it still wouldn't boot. It wouldn't even initialize.

Thinking there was something wrong with the target drive I replaced it with a brand new one and tried the above again. No luck, and nothing really different in the end.

I can boot into windows pro just fine on the source drive, but no amount of bribbing, sex, money or pain has gotten the drive to clone right with DriveImageXML.

going to give bartpe a try tomorrow. If that doesn't work i'll do it in Linux, or use Ghost.

Cheers for the update...

I would definitely be doing it from a non-windows environment such as BartPE.

Let's know how you get on.

Another good free app:

Clonezilla

http://clonezilla.org/