[manimal]

My current EIDE HD is about to crap the bed..as evidenced by the horrible vibration it makes a majority of the time it's turned on. I carried it over from my old PC into the bare bones kit i built up last year and i think it's time to replace it.
I just ordered a 320GB/7200RPM SATA HD to replace it. So here's the question (i've been out of the kingdom of geek for a while.)

should i just install the new HD as a secondary, clone it from the primary and then remove the old one? if so...i have a copy of Norton Ghost that i can get from work along with the boot disk...is that a decent program for cloning?

if my logic is way off let me know, i'm trying to make this as simple as possible and my A+ knowledge is a bit rusty.

thanks!

 

[Quo Fan]

Ghost should work just fine. Some new HDs come with an installation disc that you can copy a drive over with.

 

[manimal]

i've never used ghost before so i'm assuming it does everything for me..ie: install ghost and tell it what drive to clone to?

after the cloning is complete..do i just remove the primary drive and try to boot up or do i need to change anything in the bios?

 

[Quo Fan]

I always ran ghost from a floppy, that's how long ago I've used it. My more recent uses have been with ghost over a network.

But, yeah. Install ghost, run it and make sure you are copying to the 320 gig drive. I've always found it easier to ghost to an unformatted drive, because ghost is smart enough not to let you ghost a blank drive.

After ghost is done, take out your old drive and set your new drive as the "C" drive. Your computer should recognize the new drive and boot to it.

 

[manimal]

this process is not going smoothly! new HD installed, the version of ghost i borrowed is the old DOS one so i nixxed that and bought O&O software Disk Image 3 Pro edition (per recommendation from several software review sites...ranked higher than ghost in ease of use, etc.) http://www.oo-software.com/home/en/products/oodiskimage/
i partitioned the new drive so that i could clone my existing C: and D: drives to it. the clone was successful, but it created an unallocated partition on the new drive that consisted of all the storage larger than the drive it was cloned from. so in other words, it made my new drive the exact same size partition as the old drive instead of cloning the image and leaving the remaining space as formatted NTFS disk space.
also, when i started the clone, i had 50GB of space remaining on the original drive...after the clone i have 30GB remaining...?!? so, um..what ate up that space?
then i tried to boot to the new drive after removing the old one..no luck, nothing past BIOS POST. i booted to the recovery disk i made with the software and it showed the new drive, with the aforementioned extra partitions. i ran disk check and it had all kinds of referencing errors...even though it was now recognized as C: and D: drives.

so what now? how the hell do i boot to the cloned drive? i emailed their tech support so i'm curious to see their response but i'm really friggin frustrated right now. this software was rated for it's ease of use and reliability....so why is this screwing up?
man..i wish i could remember more from my A+ days when i actually worked on these things! i've forgotten a lot in 8 years!

 

[Quo Fan]

What I would have done is clone your "C" drive to the new drive and booted that, then copied your "D" drive to the leftover space on your new drive.

 

[manimal]

What I would have done is clone your "C" drive to the new drive and booted that, then copied your "D" drive to the leftover space on your new drive.

i've done that...and it still doesn't explain why the cloned drive won't boot. i tried it again this morning on the cloned drive and it says that the file, hal.dll is corrupt. i did another clone of it and got the same error. i'm getting my money back for this retarded program...especially since their customer service/tech support hasn't responded to my help request that i sent 3 days ago.

 

[stinkyboy]

Here.

 

[manimal]

gee...thanks