Question:
copying one HDD to another.
Well I've been using my 7200rpm drive for a while now and its working fine.
Well I installed winxp 64bit ed onto the 4200rpm drive that came with the notebook, and didnt like it so I decided to just make a backup onto the 4200 of my 7200 'C' drive that i normally use.
Well I used norton ghost to do the copy and made sure to copy the MBR and made the partition bootable and primary but when i put it into the notebook, it just gets to the windows welcome screen but doesnt show my user account and just freezes there.
Anyone know what i did wrong and what to do to fix it? Or is it better to format/recover?
note: all important data; my documents, outlook .pst files etc. are stored on my D drive and not C so i dont mind formatting...
insane
Answer:
Re: copying one HDD to another.
Is it a sata drive? I had this weird issue once where it wouldnt boot because it didnt recognise the drive id the boot.ini gave it.
Answer:
Re: copying one HDD to another.
What version of ghost are you using? the old version used to have issues copying from different speed drives to another drive with a different speed. but that was like 3 years ago.
Answer:
Re: copying one HDD to another.
There is more to cloning a HDD than just copying. One problem I have encountered after copying everything over is that Windows still looks for the swap file on the old HDD.
For my last HDD upgrade or two I used Acronis MigrateEasy, which made the process very painless. The software must fix potential problems like the reference to the swap file.
John
Answer:
Re: copying one HDD to another.
hes not copying hes using norton ghost. its designed to transfer a drive to another. all companys use this for company images and dell and everything uses a cloning machine or software when building drives. they use standard images.
Answer:
Re: copying one HDD to another.
Insane,
I had a lot of trouble with copying my drive using Norton Gohst about a month or two ago. What I found was that if I did the copy, I couldn't ever get the computer to boot right. Eventually what I did was backup to an external drive (just a spare laptop hard drive I had around) then used the restore function to restore that backup to the desired hard drive. You have to use the Norton Gohst recovery disc (you boot from the CD), which takes a while to get going) but it worked really well, and the first time. Good Luck.
Answer:
Re: copying one HDD to another.
Insane I also had much trouble doing stuff like this in the past, I found out it has to do with drive lettering and assigning all file folder paths.
Since everything is already assigned to that old drive and that old drive is recognized as drive C for example, before, then the new one won't be recognized as the master drive.
Sorry I'm not much help, but I remember I had to do some major registry changes and had to mess with commands I had no familiarity with and I had to type them in RUN in the start menu.
I found this information by googling.
It's a very tedious way of getting your drive to work and still has bugs later.
I say back up your information and just reinstall fresh. Always the best way to save hassles and headaches.
Unless someone knows how to get his installation perfect, I suggest doing a fresh install after saving your data.
Cheers,
Mike
Answer:
Re: copying one HDD to another.
I concur with the fresh start idea. Usually Ghost is used for creating a standard image across machines with identical hardware in a massive corporate deployment. That's the only place I've ever used it, well, that and making a backup image. For new or different hardware, I prefer a fresh install.
My $0.02.
Jay
Answer:
Re: copying one HDD to another.
killerjay_47 has it right on and if he's working at a big company and is in a position to hire people, *cough* I wonder if he could *cough* maybe give a poor student a summer job at his place of employment.
:D
Answer:
Re: copying one HDD to another.
Agreed i wouldnt use ghost unless the hardware is the same on the new machine or close to it. the other way is to use sysprep but again its just worth copying data and doing a fresh OS install.