Hard Drive Image question

[carnageX]

Well, I bought a new HDD because my original HDD didn't have enough space for me. What I'm doing is, basicly, taking an image of my original HDD with Norton Ghost 9.0, and I want to copy that image over to my new, larger HDD. I want my new one to become the primary bootdrive, and my old one to become strictly a back-up drive, where I'll store compressed images of my new HDD for back-ups.

I noticed that I can make the new drive the Primary drive, but if I want to make my new drive have 2 parts to it (my old one has a C: and D:, the D: portion being a recovery area), how would I do that to my new one? And, also, would I be able to re-name my new HDD to C: (and D: )? I'll have to re-name the old one first, right? Does assigning the drive a new letter format the drive, or just change the drive's paths w/out formatting the drive? I'm going to re-format the old one, so it only has 1 drive for it, also.

So, in a nutshell, I'll end up like this:

Drives C: and D: on my current HDD will be re-formatted to be 1 drive instead of 2. I'll wanna re-name it to something else.

My new drive (currently H: ), will become the boot drive, and I'll want to change the drive's letter from H: to C: and D:, so that I can copy the drive image backups I made in Norton Ghost, over to my new HDD (H.

So, Do I have to change the letters of Drive C: and D: first to something else? And then re-format (or would I add a partition?) drive H: so I can make it into Drives C: and D:.

After I get this all lworked out, I'm going to re-format my old HDD (Drives C: and D: ) so it becomes 1 full drive.

If I've confused you, I'm sorry. Please ask if you want me to explain it better. Thanks a lot for any help you can give me!

 

[S0ULphIRE]

ok, first set your new hdd to primary master, and the oldie to primary slave. (use the jumpers on the hdd's)
Then partition the new harddrive into whateva amounts of space u want, and delete the old partitions on the old hdd. If u dont want to lose whatevers on there, back it up first. Then, once u done all that...u can re-name the hard drives to whatever u want (C:, D: whateva)
nehuz...

 

[carnageX]

Ok,I'll only have to set the jumper on one, because my new one is a SATA, and I saw that it defaulted to a Master drive in the BIOS.

Re-naming the HDD doesn't erase data..right? It just simply changes file paths, right? I wanna make sure before i do anything xD.

The new HDD is still formatting, so I'll have to try this tomorrow (the back-ups are still saving as well, so they should get done at about the same time).

Thanks for the help, Soulphire =).

 

[S0ULphIRE]

Renaming the harddrive doesnt erase anything, its like renaming a folder.

 

[carnageX]

Ah, OK. I thought so, but I just wanted to be sure before I tried it. Thanks again =).

 

[carnageX]

I'm not finding where I can add a new paritition to my new drive in the Computer Management dialog. My options are just to Mark as Active, Change Drive Letter/Paths, Format, and Delete (along with the open, explore, etc.). Am I looking in the right place for it?

 

[wicked23]

Are you trying to partition the drive you booted from, or did you boot from your old drive and want to partition the new one?

In other words what drive are you currently running windows from?

 

[littleman2030]

I use ghost quite a bit at the work place. If you were to clone the entire hard drive to the new one, you should have both partitions on the drive and not have to rename any partitions.

What I would do in this case is create a ghost boot disk. If the drive hasn't been formated, you will need to do a Full Format on the drive before ghost will work. Has to have a file system, bran new hard drives come with a raw file system, unusable. Attach both hard drives to the PC, if you have a SATA and a IDE make the IDE Master. Boot to the disk and do Local>Disk>To Disk. This should make both drives exactly like each other. After Ghost has finished the clone, restart the PC. PC should boot to the SATA and say that it has found new hardware (the hard drive) and restart again.

After this you can right click "My Computer" and go to "Manage". From there you should see "Disk Management" in the left section. Click "Disk Management" and you should see both drives, they will look exactly the same. You should be able to tell by the Capacity. Right click the partition on the old drive and go to Delete Partition. Do this with both partitions. After both are removed, right click the blank hard drive space and choose "Create Partition". You will go threw a few questions, just keep hitting next. When it comes to format the drive, since the drive is used you can do a quick format and it would be perfectly fine. Full format is more for bran new hard drives. It should give you a new drive letter for the slave and the SATA should have C: and D: as your past PC did.

 

[carnageX]

So I should use the Ghost boot disc and go into DOS, rather than trying to do it while I'm in Windows? And am I supposed to make the SATA a slave drive, or can I even do that? Also, will Ghost automatically partition the new HDD into the C: and D: drives? I've never used Ghost before, so I'd lliketo know what it does exactly.

Thanks a lot for the help, littleman =).

 

[carnageX]

Ok... I'm not getting it to work. I did the following when I copied C: to my new HDD (Note: I did not do this in DOS, I did it while I was in Windows):

I set the IDE drive to Slave. In Ghost, I set the new HDD to Boot the OS option, and I set it to copy MBR (Master Boot Record). Now, if I try to copy the D: drive over to that one, it says that it'll overwrite data. I restarted, and then I went into disc management again, and when I try to format the new drive to try and start the process over, it says that it is in use,and the new drive is also marked as Active, but not system or boot. Can anybody tell me what I did wrong, and how to fix it?