Drive cloning

[Howard]

Guys,

My Media PC has an 80gb IDE drive at present, and have bought a 250GB SATA drive.

Will I have any problems using any programs like "xxclone" (windows-based) or HDclone (boots off a CD) to just clone the contents of the 80GB drive to the newer, bigger SATA drive, then boot as normal?

I don't want to reinstall the OS or copy across the drive's (nearly full) contents elsewhere, so this is the only easy option... But it's do-able with differing size drives, and IDE to SATA, right?


Cheers

[excalibur2]

Guys,

My Media PC has an 80gb IDE drive at present, and have bought a 250GB SATA drive.

Will I have any problems using any programs like "xxclone" (windows-based) or HDclone (boots off a CD) to just clone the contents of the 80GB drive to the newer, bigger SATA drive, then boot as normal?

I don't want to reinstall the OS or copy across the drive's (nearly full) contents elsewhere, so this is the only easy option... But it's do-able with differing size drives, and IDE to SATA, right?


Cheers

Well I'm one of the unlucky ones that couldn't get a sata and ide drive to work together properly, anyway if you have my problems, you can go into safe mode and transfer all files over....of course most programs would have to be re-installed.
But would add, winxp does get cluttered up and a new install on your new hard drive should be considered and your old ide drive should be used for storing files etc

[Howard]

I agree it gets cluttered, except this install's only a week or so old Oh well I'll try cloning, if it doesn't work, reinstall time

[directhex]

it might work

depends on whether your sata controller is supported by windows without extra drivers or not (e.g. via onboard is)

[Howard]

So would perhaps plugging the drive in, letting Windows set up drivers, and actually able to see the new drive before cloning, be wise?

[blueball]

So would perhaps plugging the drive in, letting Windows set up drivers, and actually able to see the new drive before cloning, be wise?

Very

[tinners]

Ive done it using Norton Ghost 10 - you just need to disable smart sector copy when you do the backup.

[IAmATeaf]

I've used Norton Ghost to do this, simply boot up of the a boot diskette and select source and destination.

[herulach]

the wonder of partitions eh? I did that with dd running from a linux live disk, and it worked fine, however, that was 2 ide drives, and i made sure that they occupied the same port after it was done. a firend tried it ide to sata and it fell over (presumably due to drivers)

[excalibur2]

So would perhaps plugging the drive in, letting Windows set up drivers, and actually able to see the new drive before cloning, be wise?

Get your sata drivers on a floppy disc ready, for when asked by winxp.

[Howard]

That's if I end up reformatting


Hopefully the drive will arrive today so I'll give it a bash tonight and post back

[amjedm]

I may have to move contents from one drive to another drive like you, so please let me know how you get on.

Thanks.

[Howard]

Well it cloned using HDClone (http://www.miray.de/products/sat.hdclone.html) in about half an hour, booted into Windows fine (takes a little longer to boot now though ) but as I suspected it was only 80GB with the rest unallocated But that was a quick fix in partitionMagic

[amjedm]

Did you use the 'Free' version.

Do you think it's slower because you copied instead of re-installing?

Any settings turned off on the Sata drive/port in Bios (haven't a clue what I'm talking about).

[Howard]

I used the Pro edition. I don't know why it's slower, and no I left the bios

[amjedm]

I need some advice please

As the free version of HD Clone didn't have many features and probably wouldn't have allowed me to copy partitions I used Ghost.

Copied from a 40GB IDE (using SATA adaptor) to a 80GB SATA.

When I unplug the original 40GB drive the computer doesn't boot - I get the error message 'insert boot disk'.

I have about 7GB space at the beginning of both disks (just in case I decide to dual boot) and then a 20-30GB XP partition.