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Booting Copied Harddrive

Discussion in 'PC hardware help' started by Auslander, Apr 13, 2005.

  1. Auslander

    Auslander Senior member

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    Okay, so here we go: i need to copy my current hard drive to another and be able to boot it in the current computer. If i use Nero BackItUp to copy one hard disc to another, will i be able to boot from the copied drive? if not, is there a program that would allow me to? thanks in advance.
     
  2. ddp

    ddp Moderator Staff Member

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    if the copied drive is set as master or the only hd than yes can boot up
     
  3. Auslander

    Auslander Senior member

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    cool,that's great. next problem: is there a way to use Nero BackItUp to copy one drive to another? at the moment, it will only let me copy to cds...and i don't have the capability to do that at the moment.
     
  4. ddp

    ddp Moderator Staff Member

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    don't know as i use norton's ghost program
     
  5. Auslander

    Auslander Senior member

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    Would Norton Ghost create a bootable copy?
     
  6. ddp

    ddp Moderator Staff Member

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    yes!!
     
  7. Auslander

    Auslander Senior member

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    okay, cool, ddp. currently, i'm downloading a program similar to Ghost called Casper XP 2.0. heard of it? sounds good.
     
  8. ddp

    ddp Moderator Staff Member

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    yes as it is a 2.5meg program as i have a copy of it
     
  9. Auslander

    Auslander Senior member

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    well, i downloaded it. gonna give it a try tomorrow and *crosses fingers* hopes it works! :) i'm only going through all this cuz while installing XP Pro on the new drive (got it from newegg today)windows gave me the blue screen of death with a driver conflict. i had most of my stuff installed and was getting irritated with windows (who doesn't) then things just went down hill. i figure if i copy the drive, i'll use the upgrade option on that and when everything in running smoothly i'll wipe the original drive and use it for backing-up. sounds like a decent plan, eh? lol.
     
  10. ddp

    ddp Moderator Staff Member

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    as long as both drives aren't identical physically than probably all right
     
  11. Auslander

    Auslander Senior member

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    they're both Seagate 80 GB 7200 rpm drives...different models, but basically the same.
     
  12. ddp

    ddp Moderator Staff Member

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    watch it than if both have same # of cylinders & such as i ran into a problem when ghosting 2 identical drives. had her info on my drive, her drive just been formated & cloned her drive onto mine stead of vice versa. got a professional data recovery program worth about $1400US as she needed some info for court. got all the info back
     
  13. Auslander

    Auslander Senior member

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    well, the drives are named "C" and "I", so as long as I keep a very close eye on what i'm doing, i think i'll be okay. trying to make as few mistakes as possible, lol. thanks for the warning, though.
     
  14. ScubaBud

    ScubaBud Regular member

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    Auslander

    Other programs that will do a complete backup are:

    Drive Copy 4.0… Even though it needs a boot disk with Windows ME, it will do what you want.

    Norton Ghost 9.0 which is really Drive Image 7.01 will work.

    Norton Ghost 2003 which is really the original Ghost Program will also work.
     
  15. Auslander

    Auslander Senior member

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    well, i'm having some boot issues, but i think i'm going to try to work them out on saturday, when i have some time. overall point is, i wish linux was more practical :p
     
  16. Auslander

    Auslander Senior member

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    UPDATE:

    at first i thought my boot problems were created by Casper XP and it's malfuntion, but then i realize that i needed to change my jumper settings from Cable Select to Master/Slave. With that done, the new and copied hard drive booted up just fine. i had to reactivate Windows XP Home, but that wasn't really an issue. I hope to do the upgrade to XP Pro this coming Friday night, and i'll update again if successful. if not, it may be late Saturday, as i will have to do some work to get back to my current stance. overall, Casper is a nice program, and until i can acquire a copy of Ghost, i have no problem downloading a 1 MB proggy every thirty days. they're a rather nice setup and at this point, i recommend them. if i had cash/credit cards, i'd purchase it. as i digress, i might as well say that this summer i'll be 18 and then i'll probably get a debit card (credit is the devil! X-D) and buy it that way. ta ta, all.
     
  17. ddp

    ddp Moderator Staff Member

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    teach & learn
     
  18. wallen69

    wallen69 Member

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    I wanted to do just this. My PC has an old HDD (10GB) and a newer 120GB HDD. I had the old drive as C and the newer drive as D. Basically I had Windows XP and my applications on C and the virtual memory and documnets on D. Having recently built a new faster PC around these drives I was disapointed by the speed. A small programme that I downloaded indicated that the 120GB drive was 2 to 3 times faster than the 10GB drive in terms of transferring data. The programme also indicated that the 10GB drive failed one of its tests (although CHDSK reports no problems). I decided to scrap the 10GB drive as I have never used more than 6Gb of the D drive for data, meaning the 120 Gb would hold all my software (about 7Gb) and data with loads to spare. I backed up all my data unto DVD and used the Windows XP Administrative Tools control panel to re-partition the 120Gb drive into a 20GB partition and a 100GB partition. I then recopied my documents to the new 100GB partition. I then used Drive Image 5.0 to do a direct disk to disk copy of my C drive to the 20GB partition on the 120GB HDD (this function of Drive Image is supposed to allow you to move everything from an old HDD to a new and allow you to boot etc). I then removed the old 10GB C drive and reset the 120GB jumpers to Master. On restarting the PC at first everything seemed to be fine as the PC started to boot into Windows XP, but once the Windows XP welcome screen goes the system just hangs at a black screen with cursor with no sign of the desktop loading. I tried fixing the problem with the XP installation CD, but when you choose the repair option it just dumps you with a c:Windows/ DOS style prompt and does nothing. I then tried again, continuing with the installation to get to a stage when it detected that XP was already installed and offered to try and fix it. However when I presses R (for this repair option) it just erased the disk and started a fresh installation. I terminated this and refitted the old Drive :(.

    Any suggestions as to how to use my better HDD without having to reinstall from scratch (fighting the fact that a frswh XP installation is so unstable because of a problem with the video driver installed by the XP disk, making the PC crash so frequently that it is almost impossible to get the stable driver installed from the CD that came with the video card..........aarrgh).
     
    Last edited: Jun 29, 2005
  19. Auslander

    Auslander Senior member

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    i have no idea on this one, man. hmmm...
     

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