Norton Ghost

[digitaldiscipline]

Any caveats as far as using Ghost to copy the contents of C:/ and D:/ to a new physical drive (which will also be two partitions)?

I think the 8 year old Maxtor 40gb in K's machine is starting to fail, and will be replacing it with the shiny 200GB WD I have laying around the house.

The instructions within Ghost's Help file are deceptively, gratuitously, and conspicuously simple, which has my spider sense tingling. Is it -really- as easy as "install new drive, ghost info from old drive to new drive, pull old drive (making sure jumpers are correct throughout)?"

Comments

[arcsine.livejournal.com]

Ghost adds empty space at the end of the image, adjusts the partition table, all that crap? I'd do this inside a filesystem instead of with Ghost unless you _need_ to keep the OS. Operating systems should come with expiration dates, an install of 2K pro used daily as a personal machine has a nightmare of a registry after about a year.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

She's using XP Pro. I want to avoid having to reinstall the OS if at all possible (I keep on top of the registry pretty well).

My problem with simply exporting/importing the user profile is the need to reinstall all the applications afterwards.

[arcsine.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but then you don't have to fix those lovely BSODs and random filesystem naughtiness that starts cropping up after about three years. If you really want to bit-for-bit migrate a drive, I'd dump the entire 40GB disk image on the 200GB drive, then use some kind of partition resizer (or even go dynamic disk and do it that way, at least you know you have a backup) to push the D: partition out to the end of the disk.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

My problem at the moment was that I'd copied the MBR, which made F:/ (first partition on the 200) unable to be made into anything but F:/... I need to figure out how to clone C:/ to it again (overwriting is no big deal, source disk is fine) in such a manner that it can subsequently be convinced its name is C:/.

Maybe exporting the registry & user profile and importing it after a fresh windows install isn't such a bad idea.

[arcsine.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I don't think Ghost is smart enough to write it's own MBRs based on image size _and_ existing partitions. User profile would be fine, but it really shouldn't take all that long to reinstall your apps to make taking a swiss-cheese registry with you worth it.

[ajohnymous.livejournal.com]

The main caveat is not to ghost from the 200GB to the 40GB.

Other than that, yeah, a basic clone is pretty simple. However, since you have two partitions on your source disk, I'm not sure you'll also be able to resize your partitions if you do a disk-to-disk copy. (If not, you oculd always fix that next with Partition Magic.) If you copy each partition seperately, I think you might be able to also custom resize partition during the clone operation. However, partition to partion might not also copy the boot sector (which you could also fix with the XP install disk recovery mode.)

Easiest would just be clone disk-to-disk and, if you can't resize during the operation, then resize later with Partition Magic.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

I'll give this a shot (I don't know if I have partition magic laying around the house). as long as I don't nuke the 40, I can fuck around endlessly until it does what I want.

[mighty-man.livejournal.com]

Exactly what ajohnmyous said:
Ghost the 40 onto the new 200 (you'll be amazed a how fast it does this in comparison to reguar transfers). Then use partition magic to resize your partitions to however you want it.

As for the MBR copy -- can you boot into DOS and use FDISK /mbr, then FDISK and FORMAT? Hmm..on second thought, you might want to do that under XP and not under DOS, at least for the format, otherwise you don't get the lovely benefits of win32 fs.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

I can probably fdisk the 200 inside winxp without trouble.

the problem i ran into last night was that the first partition on the 200 was remaining F:/ after the 40 was pulled, not reverting to C:/ as needed.

iirc, i did do what john recommended while messing with it last night; will continue fucking around with it as time permits.

[mighty-man.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's what the FDISK command should take care of as long as you use the /mbr switch. *however* I can't remember if the current version of FDISK that ships with XP has the /mbr switch -- you may need to find a win98 boot floppy.

Otherwise, partition magic (before you ghost) should also be able to take care of that...it's actually a pretty powerful tool.

[ajohnymous.livejournal.com]

If you do a basic disk-to-disk clone, you shouldn't need to mess with any other stuff like fdisk. You especially shouldn't need to create any partitions in XP (which is how you might get a 'sticky' drive letter assigned).

Just boot from DOS (either via floppy or bootable CD), start Ghost, clone 40GB disk to 200GB disk, replace 40GB disk with 200GB, and you should have the identical XP environment now running off the 200GB drive.

Then, if you want different partition sizes, noodle around with Partition Magic to move and resize partitions.