Best back up utility

Im expecting a new hdd tomorrow. Anyone know of a good back up utility so i dont have to reinstall everything from scratch?

Or is the windows files and settings transfer wizard good enough?


Things im looking to transfer, are my bookmarks programs, like adobe cs2, office 2003, my outlook settings and nero. Basically i wanna avoid unecissary downtime. I just wanna pop in new hdd, load recovery disk, transfer back up and go.


Can anyone help?

 

You can't transfer programs like Photoshop and Office unless you transfer them with the whole OS. Too many registry settings and the like.

You need something that'll transfer your entire partition over, like Ghost. Partition Magic might do it...I'm not really sure. Ghost is pretty much the standard though. I'm sure there are some freeware versions out there, though, that'll do the same thing.

 

i have nortons ghost. but what do i do within ghost? do i back up the partition to dvds?

I have an extrenal hdd but media center edition wont read it.

 

You can use Ghost to just transfer the partion data to the other drive. If Windows isn't reading your other hard drive...that's another problem you'll need to fix first.

If not, you can back up the partition to DVDs or CD's. Ghost will talk you through it pretty easily. You'll want to boot off the Ghost CD to do that, probably.

 

ok so if im using ghost i wont need to use the recovery cds right? Also ghost will copy everything from the drivers to registry changes

 

You're transferring everything on that partition over to your new one...so no, you don't need to use the recovery CD's, cause you aren't reinstalling anything. You're just copying everything over.