How can I transfer my entire harddrive contents to another harddrive?

[soarwitheagles]

Hi all!

I recently purchased a new WD Cavier Black with the 32 MB cache. I would like to transfer all my HD contents [including windows vista ultimate] from my older WD 16MB cache HD to this brand spanking new WD Cavier Black HD.

Is it possible to do this without flaws and so that it will work exactly as before?

If yes, can you direct me to the correct information to do this please?

Any help on this issue would be greatly appreciated.

The system in which I would like to do this has these components:

Thermaltake M9 Cool Case
Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit w/SP1
Gigabyte GA-EP43-DS3L
Intel Q6600
Arctic Cooler Freezer 7 Pro
Infinity ATX PSU 600W
4GB DDR2 Crucial 800 MHz
E-GeForce 8600GTS DDR3 256MB
Memorex X16 Dual Layer DVD
Western Digital SATA 320 GB
Maxtor SATAII 1TB

Thank you,

Soar

 

[Hefemeister]

You can use norton ghost (paid program)
or you can use clonzilla which is free.
Clonezilla

 

[soarwitheagles]

You can use norton ghost (paid program)
or you can use clonzilla which is free.
Clonezilla

Hef,

Thank you for replying. I do have an older copy of Ghost [2003] that I have never used. Do you think it would work with Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit or is the software too old?

Also, can you tell me which of Norton or Clonezilla is better or more reliable or if they are both dependable?

[I would like to avoid messing this up and having to reinstall everything again].

Thank you,

Soar

 

[Hefemeister]

I have not used clonzilla but have heard good things about it. I do have experience with ghost and it works well. Just try it with your vista install and see if it works. It should be no problem. You really cannot mess up because what you do is install the new drive, ghost the info over and then set it up to be the primary boot drive. If something is messed up on it you still have the original drive with all the information and you would just have to switch it back to being the primary boot device.

 

[soarwitheagles]

I have not used clonzilla but have heard good things about it. I do have experience with ghost and it works well. Just try it with your vista install and see if it works. It should be no problem. You really cannot mess up because what you do is install the new drive, ghost the info over and then set it up to be the primary boot drive. If something is messed up on it you still have the original drive with all the information and you would just have to switch it back to being the primary boot device.

Hef,

Now that sounds cool! And here I had Ghost in my drawer for over 5 years and never had a clue what it was designed to do.

Thanks again for the info and I will definitely try it tomorrow!

Soar

 

[KSoD]

I highly doubt that a 5 year old version of Ghost will work flawlessly with Vista. There are issues getting programs designed for Vista to work flawlessly.

 

[soarwitheagles]

I highly doubt that a 5 year old version of Ghost will work flawlessly with Vista. There are issues getting programs designed for Vista to work flawlessly.

Mak,

Thanks for the heads up. Do you think the clonzilla would be best then?

Soar

 

[carnageX]

Research to see if there is any problems with using it with Vista. That or get a newer version of Ghost.

 

[KSoD]

IT doesnt matter what i think. It matters what you think and do. I can sit here and go off on a rant about how we have told people time and time again to seperate their OS from their personal files to prevent this type of thing from happening. I can sti here and go off about how it doesnt matter that the new drive has 32 MB Cache on it as if it is SATA II they will still both transfer at the same rate and the amount of cache that they have will not be noticed by the time it takes to access the drive.

With the setup you are running you wont see the difference at all. Running a Quad Core CPU with 4GB of RAM you will not see a big drop in access time moving all yoru files. So for me to give my personal advice would be irrelevant as i dont think you should make such a big fuss over the new drive having 32 MB of Cache in the first place.

So it is up to you. Go to Symantec's site, find out if the version of Ghost you have can work. If so find out about the possible problems you might come across. Go to the CloneZilla site and read up on it. See if there are many problems with using that software to do what you want.

We can sit here and give the same suggestions we do everytime a Image Question comes up.

Ghost, Acronis True Image, CloneZilla

But each persons view is going to be different. Each person has had success with one, failure with the other and has not tried the 3rd. Some of us have used all 3 and we still have our reservations about all of them.

Ghost is alright.
Acronis takes the Free Space as part of the image.
CloneZilla is good, but still a work in progress.

All 3 of them will take you to tinker with them to do what you want. So the choice is yours what you do with the advice. We can only guide you. We can not give you the answer. It is for you to decide. Not for us to tell you.

 

[office politics]

i think old versions of ghost will work with vista as long as you're booting to dos and running ghost. This way there is no interaction with the OS. Ghost itself is a low level system. It copies bits off the drive and saves them to a file. If you put the same bits in the same place on the disk, you can expect the same results, if you're using the same hardware.

Acronis True Image touts being able to restore to different hardware

soon im going to try to virtualize a physical machine. the plan is to boot to knoppix (linux live cd) and run dd piped to gzip and split to image the disk. Repeat the process with a different switch in dd to restore the disk to a vm.

Instructions
michi blog: HDD or partition backup with dd