OK, How do I do this?

[eagle1]

A friend of mine will buy another Hard Drive (a Western Digital 20gb hd) to replace his 6gb drive. The thing is that he doesn't want to lose his information or Windows settings so he wants to pass all of the info from the smaller drive to the new drive.!

Now, I have heard about the Ghost copying method, but is there another way that this can be done?
Xcopy?
etc.?

Thanks.!

[surrealchereal]

Why not chain them together, make the 6 gig a slave to his new Primary. Put a fresh operating system on the new one, pluck off of the old one what he wants. Use a utility like Norton to do it or just click highlight and copy and paste. Then keep the old one for extra file space. I have moved Gigs of data that way, with no problem.

[This message has been edited by surrealchereal (edited 07-08-2001).]

[Philip1952]

WD has a program on the disk that comes with the drive. If you are getting an oem drive with out the disk go over the wd website and download it.
I have never used it before. so I don't know how good it is. Or if there are any problems with it eather. I do use WD myself. But I just do clean installs on new drives.

[This message has been edited by Philip1952 (edited 07-08-2001).]

[surrealchereal]

I agree with Phillip, as far as the clean install goes. I sure hate to gunk things up right away. You really don't need it, with 6 G if you have 128mrgs or more ram. That's just one less piece of code you don't need in the regestry.

[Eli]

Assuming you don't need any BIOS overlay software, it can easily be done with xcopy within Windows. Heck I did it just the other day for the hundredth or so time. Hook up the new drive as a slave or secondary master. Fdisk and format it (with the /S option) as required. Within a W9x DOS box (very important to be in Windows) run:

"xcopy c:\ d:\ /c /e /f /h /r /s /v /k"

without the quotes. Shut down and set the new drive as the primary master. Boot from a W9x floppy disk and fire up fdisk again and set the active partition (to make the drive bootable). Remove the floppy, reboot, and it should boot fine. It sounds a lot more complicated than it really is, and there's no need for extra software.

[Roy]

Western Digital's Data Lifeguard freeware should do the job. If the 6GB drive is not recognized by Data Lifeguard, DriveCopy is an inexpensive alternative to Ghost. It's specifically intended for making an image of a smaller drive onto a larger one.

Eli's approach also should do the trick.

[Bsdboy]

Western Digital Data Lifeguard tools works great,the drive should come with it or you can get it here (http://www.wdc.com/service/ftp/drives.html)

Bsdboy

[NDC]

I've never used "Western Digital Data Lifeguard" before. What's the difference between this free disk cloning utiltiy Vs. not-free version of Norton Ghost?

[Chiguy]

You can also use Disk Wizard from Seagate and Disk Go from Fujitsu. Hook up the 2 hardrives and boot from the old one. Istall the software on the hardisk and use the File Copy program in the directory that it is installed to. When the Disk Wizard or Disk Go program begins when you reboot, close it and run File Copy. Enter the source drive and the destination drive. It copies your entire source drive to the destination drive. You can then disconnect the old drive and replace it with the new one. I've done this several times with no problems. I hope this helps.

[This message has been edited by Chiguy (edited 07-08-2001).]

[gfunkmartin]

ok, here's my suggestion:

set the 20 GB disk as a slave and the other as master, and boot up to windows like you normally would on the 6GB one.
Start -> Run -> "format d:" (don't use the /s switch, you don't want system files)
then, when that's done:
Start -> Run ->
"xcopy32 c:\ /h/i/c/k/e/r/y d:"
That should work just as well as ghost

[eagle1]

Thanks for the suggestions! Will try them and post my results.!!

Thanks a bunch.!!!

eagle1 signing off....

[Fingers]

Of all the methods proposed, I prefer using DataLifeguard Tools, because it partitions, formats, and copies in just one step

If you choose to fdisk(partition), format, and copy the contents manually, then I most agree with gfunkmartin's suggestion of xcopy32 C:\ /h/i/c/k/e/r/y D:,
although personally, I run both the "fdisk" and "format" from a DOS boot disk.

[Eli]

Remember that with either my method or gfunkmartin's you will still have to run fdisk again when you're done to set the active partition to make the drive bootable, as I mentioned in my earlier post.

Either of our methods should be the preferred method since they work just as well as the alternatives, and they don't use any extra software. But hey, that's my opinion. http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif

[eagle1]

Thanks again guys,/!!!