Can you Ghost and replace a drive?

[Linok]

Hey everyone,

Right now, I have a hdd that's on it's last leg. The problem this that this is the drive that holds my XP installation and programs. I was wondering if it was possible to ghost the drive onto a new hdd and replace the dying drive with the new copy. The question I had with this, is that I think XP keeps info about the hardware confiuration that may cause it to be too confused (or stupid) to figure out what's going on, making the ghosted drive esentially useless.

Second, assuming this is possible, what software would be best (and free) to do this? I'm hoping there's a live CD flavor of linux (possibly Knoppix) that could ghost a NTFS disk onto a larger drive (probably going from a 40gb to a 60gb).

Thanks in advance!

 

[turtile]

It should work fine.

XP won't boot if you change the hardware (like the Motherboard). You'll have to do a system repair with the disk.

 

[Linok]

But will a hardware change like a new hard drive be a problem?

 

[Trotter]

Ghost will do the trick. I know it will, because I did just that about a month ago, moving from a 40gig to my current 160gig.

Be sure to have Ghost copy the MBR (master boot record), or you won't be able to use the new drive as your C: drive.

I dunno about free ones. A friend gave me Ghost and Partion Mgic, so I don't know what they cost.... try checking out majorgeeks.com and looking at Drive Utilities and seeing what you can find.

 

[Linok]

Thanks,

I've done some looking around and found a program called hdclone that works for free as long as your cloning to a larger drive than what you currently have. Then you just have to repartition the rest with Partition Magic, or XP's disk management, or whatever.

You guys are awesome

 

[Hefemeister]

ghost works great for a hard drive swap. Have done it many times to perfection. Do delete data on old drive until you have verified the data on the new drive as an emergency back plan.

 

[turtile]

The hard drive doesn't matter. It will work fine.