copying one HDD to another.

Well I've been using my 7200rpm drive for a while now and its working fine.
Well I installed winxp 64bit ed onto the 4200rpm drive that came with the notebook, and didnt like it so I decided to just make a backup onto the 4200 of my 7200 'C' drive that i normally use.

Well I used norton ghost to do the copy and made sure to copy the MBR and made the partition bootable and primary but when i put it into the notebook, it just gets to the windows welcome screen but doesnt show my user account and just freezes there.

Anyone know what i did wrong and what to do to fix it? Or is it better to format/recover?

note: all important data; my documents, outlook .pst files etc. are stored on my D drive and not C so i dont mind formatting...

insane

 

Is it a sata drive? I had this weird issue once where it wouldnt boot because it didnt recognise the drive id the boot.ini gave it.

 

What version of ghost are you using? the old version used to have issues copying from different speed drives to another drive with a different speed. but that was like 3 years ago.

 

There is more to cloning a HDD than just copying. One problem I have encountered after copying everything over is that Windows still looks for the swap file on the old HDD.

For my last HDD upgrade or two I used Acronis MigrateEasy, which made the process very painless. The software must fix potential problems like the reference to the swap file.

John

 

hes not copying hes using norton ghost. its designed to transfer a drive to another. all companys use this for company images and dell and everything uses a cloning machine or software when building drives. they use standard images.

 

Insane,

I had a lot of trouble with copying my drive using Norton Gohst about a month or two ago. What I found was that if I did the copy, I couldn't ever get the computer to boot right. Eventually what I did was backup to an external drive (just a spare laptop hard drive I had around) then used the restore function to restore that backup to the desired hard drive. You have to use the Norton Gohst recovery disc (you boot from the CD), which takes a while to get going) but it worked really well, and the first time. Good Luck.

 

Insane I also had much trouble doing stuff like this in the past, I found out it has to do with drive lettering and assigning all file folder paths.

Since everything is already assigned to that old drive and that old drive is recognized as drive C for example, before, then the new one won't be recognized as the master drive.


Sorry I'm not much help, but I remember I had to do some major registry changes and had to mess with commands I had no familiarity with and I had to type them in RUN in the start menu.

I found this information by googling.

It's a very tedious way of getting your drive to work and still has bugs later.

I say back up your information and just reinstall fresh. Always the best way to save hassles and headaches.

Unless someone knows how to get his installation perfect, I suggest doing a fresh install after saving your data.

Cheers,
Mike

 

I concur with the fresh start idea. Usually Ghost is used for creating a standard image across machines with identical hardware in a massive corporate deployment. That's the only place I've ever used it, well, that and making a backup image. For new or different hardware, I prefer a fresh install.
My $0.02.
Jay

 

killerjay_47 has it right on and if he's working at a big company and is in a position to hire people, *cough* I wonder if he could *cough* maybe give a poor student a summer job at his place of employment.

 

Agreed i wouldnt use ghost unless the hardware is the same on the new machine or close to it. the other way is to use sysprep but again its just worth copying data and doing a fresh OS install.

 

That would have been on an early co-op placement of mine a couple years back. I'm in engineering and we do internship-style placements as part of our degree requirements. For my first job, because I had no experience I workind in the IT department of a medium-sized company doing software installs and maintenance and stuff like that.
Sorry I can't help you out, but really, I'm probably about as poor as you are, or will be when I pay for my new laptop.

Cheers,
Jay

 

wow cheers for all the replies, I didnt expect it that many

Well I'm using norton ghost verison 9 .NTFS and 80GB supported.
I didnt ghost it (didnt use the CD or make a image) I just used the feature that allows you to copy one HDD's partition to another HDD. The second Hdd was in a USB 2.5" drive case if that matters.

I've copied the 'D' drive across and the hidden recovery partition without any problems at all!

thats how i used the recovery partition that i coppied from the standard 4200rpm when installing my 7200rpm drive.
So it does work for a 'logical' drive..

I'm starting to think that it might have something to do with that page file but i always had it on the 'C' drive. so I cant so it trying to find it on 'D'.

Ahh i dont know, I'll just start over... I dont have that much stuff installed, and I've got the install files for all my stuff anyway.

I've got the format and instalation of all software with windows updates down to around 2 hours ish..


Thanks for the help anyway guys, much appreciated!

 

Insane good to see you've got your stuff in order.

What the, just noticed your sig'. Two laptops eh? lucky son of a...

 

I've got jr tech spots open if you were in socal.

the fact that the hardware is different could be causeing a bit of a problem. I too have used ghost in mass deployment operations when new shipments of Dells were shipped and needed to all be upgraded to pro, all identical machines.

 

let me count... one two , why yes bought one for the GF.... but she's at my place most of the time, so its here most of the time...

well I might take hers cos its slightally better (after i put my faster HDD in it )

insane