Is cloning a good idea? Yes--but HOW does one go about it?

Akashio · Post by **Akashio** » Mon Jan 12, 2004 3:02 am

I just bought a Seagate 160gb SATA HDD and want to install it in my computer. My problem is, I already have 2 HDDs in my system. I want to transfer all the data from one driver to another. I'll clarify--

My system, as far as HDDs go, looks like this:
C Drive -- 20gig ATA-66
D Drive (for amvs) -- 100gig ATA-100

I want to transfer all the data from my D Drive to to new SATA drive and I then I want to transfer all the data from my C drive to the D Drive. Then, the old D Drive would become the new C drive and the SATA drive would become the D drive slave.

How can I do that? I'm sure it's possible.

klinky · Post by **klinky** » Mon Jan 12, 2004 3:53 pm

It's more of the a pain in the ass than it's worth I think...

But you could do it I guess. You'd want to clone your current drives to partitions on the new SATA drive. I don't think there would be a way to merge both drives onto the SATA drive on a single partition, but there should be a way to copy both onto partitions on your new hard drive...

Once you're done you'd want to delete the partitions on the your old drives, this should allow the new drive to kick in as the main boot up drive. If you have other Primary partitions on any of the drives it can mess up drive ordering. :/

>_<

I would suggest you get ahold of Ghost or I believe, DiskCopy...

Corran · Post by **Corran** » Mon Jan 12, 2004 6:40 pm

Partition Magic 8 is the best tool I've every used for such a problem. It retails for about 60-70 bucks.

I recently, durring all of my upgrading, took the c: drive from my loud, obnoxious, 5400rpm 20 gig hard drive and using partition magic copied the partition to a new 7200 rpm 60 gig drive.

What I did.

Start up partition magic

- Copy partition c: to new drive. (There has to be enough unallocated space to do this on the new drive. If you allready have it installed and formated, which you should, you can resize the partition on it to make room for the new partition, preferabally at the begining of the drive.)

- Change drive letter of old partition to something other than what it is now.

- Change drive letter of the new copy of the partition to the old one.

- Apply the changes. It will ask you if you want to use drive mapper to compensate for the drive letter changes. Select no.

- The computer will then restart and durring the startup process it will begin start applying the changes.

- Once it is totally finished turn of the computer.

- Remove the old hard drive and replace it with the new one. Make sure the jumper settings are correct and startup the computer.

DJ_Izumi · Post by **DJ_Izumi** » Mon Jan 12, 2004 7:38 pm

'Retail Software' what's that?

the Black Monarch · Post by **the Black Monarch** » Wed Jan 14, 2004 6:37 pm

Akashio wrote: I want to transfer all the data from my D Drive to to new SATA drive and I then I want to transfer all the data from my C drive to the D Drive. Then, the old D Drive would become the new C drive and the SATA drive would become the D drive slave.

How can I do that?

First, transfer all the data from your D Drive to the new SATA drive. Then, transfer all the data from you C drive to the D Drive. Now the old D Drive will become the new C drive and the SATA drive will become the D drive slave.

There, wasn't that easy?

the Black Monarch · Post by **the Black Monarch** » Wed Jan 14, 2004 6:49 pm

Okay okay, all jokes aside... plug in the new drive to one of the IDE cables somewhere. Let's call it F, because chances are that E is taken by the CD-ROM drive. Or you could remove the CD-ROM drive and put the new hard drive in its place, in which case it would be E. So let's call it the E/F drive, just for fun. Anyway, once you have all 3 hard drives hooked up and your computer turned on, do the following:

(1) Select all files/folders on the C drive that you wish to save, cut them, and paste them to the E/F drive (do not attempt to move operating system files this way).
(2) Select all files/folders on the D drive that you wish to save, cut them, and paste them to the E/F drive.
(3) Turn off computer
(4) Remove C drive. Put D drive where C used to be and E/F where D used to be. Put CD-ROM drive back if you removed it.
(5) Turn on computer. When it bitches at you about being unable to find an operating system, put your Windows CD into the cd-rom drive, reformat D (which it should now be calling C), and install the OS onto your newly reformatted D/C drive.

Presto!

Corran · Post by **Corran** » Wed Jan 14, 2004 7:20 pm

You have to reinstall all of the programs if you do it that way

the Black Monarch · Post by **the Black Monarch** » Thu Jan 15, 2004 6:11 pm

For the computer to consider them "installed," yes. For them to work, no.

Corran · Post by **Corran** » Thu Jan 15, 2004 8:16 pm

the Black Monarch wrote:For the computer to consider them "installed," yes. For them to work, no.

??? Programs store a LOT of information in the registry. Most programs can't function without knowing the info they enter in there that they insert during installation. It doesn't matter whether or not if Window's "thinks" they are installed but more so that the program knows where important files are that are needed for operation. Go ahead and try your method and see for yourself. I did it a long time ago. -_-

the Black Monarch · Post by **the Black Monarch** » Fri Jan 16, 2004 4:07 am

I used to do it all the fricking time, and most programs just kept on ticking.

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Is cloning a good idea? Yes--but HOW does one go about it?

Is cloning a good idea? Yes--but HOW does one go about it?

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