COPY DRIVE/SYSTEM

[krusty]

I have recently reformatted & renewed my system(Win 98). Due to unforseen changes I will need to upgrade my 6.4 G drive to a 14 G drive & I am NOT restarting from scratch again!.
In the past I have used xcopy c:\*.* d:\*.*/s/c/h/e/r/k without problems though some people say this does not work properly.

I am interested to know what methods people use to copy a drive. Is there any point buying "Drive Copy" or the like?

Thanks,...Krusty

[Joel Kleppinger]

I'm not sure I'd mess with an image from HD to HD. I personally have just used the "highlight the whole drive and drag it to the new drive" patented method. There is a file or two that cannot be transferered through this method (I believe the Win9x swap file was the only one for me.. and maybe a file in c:\windows). In this case, start in the root dir, and highlight everything in it, except the windows dir and win386.swp. Then, assuming all the other files copy ok (probably a half-hour depending on your HD size), drag the windows dir over. If any files won't copy and you have to abort, then try the copy again without highlighting that file... it should work fine with only one or two files being uncopyable.

I've done this several times with many different computers so it is known to work, and it's the easiest method I know. http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif Give it a shot if you want. If it doesn't work, you can always delete everything off the drive you just copied to, and try a different method.

I don't use xcopy because I've noticed that it doesn't preserve long filenames which is incredibly annoying. So that's my method.

[This message has been edited by Joel Kleppinger (edited 07-26-99).]

[MrT]

http://www.symantec.com/sabu/ghost/fs_ghost.html
Very easy to use product. I have used it and it works great. Hope that helps.

[Ed_S]

I use DiskClone. Works great, single floppy dos program. Set drives master/slave, boot system with this as boot disk & follow the prompts. No need to fdisk or format, program does it all. Nothing is installed, so no leftovers to be removed. Have used several times flawlessly, once on a drive that was too full to install anything & was actually crashing due to low disk space! Owner refused to delete anything, preferred to buy larger drive.

[krusty]

Drag & drop worked just fine

[MaxVal]

I've used the Xcopy32 method many times with no problems. One note though- do it from windows DOS box. The only file that will not copy is the swap file, which will be recreated when you boot from the copied drive!
MAX