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I need to replace the hard drive in my home desktop PC. (Have suffered a couple of hangs, and the event log is full of hard disk paging read/write errors)

The last time I replaced a hard drive, six years ago on a Win9x system, the replacement Matrox drive came with a utility to clone the old drive's image to the new drive. Do any of the disk vendors offer a similar capability for NTFS, or do I have to buy a disk management utility like GHOST to transfer my system to a new drive?

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Art McDonald
Premier Amateur #518
2008 Dishman Cup
Pivot Cone Snob

Rodney is a waxer (but in a good way)

I used Seagate's DiskWizard multiple times in the past to clone some hard drives. I am not certain if they [Seagate] lock the software for only Seagate drives (I was cloning two Seagate Barracudas at the time), but it may be worth a shot.

Best of luck!

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2003 Audi A4 1.8T quattro | Dolphin Gray | Ebony | 5 Speed Manual | Sport & Premium Packages
144 TIR (GS)

You can download a free "trial" from the Acronis website that will capture an image for you.

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Has no responsibility whatsoever.

I would never do that as my method of retaining the operating system, FWIW. You've likely got files that are screwed up and you don't want those hanging around. I'd strongly consider reinstalling everything fresh to a new drive and then image the old one to a separate partition or an entirely different drive so that you can retrieve your data.


--Donnie

Donnie beat me to it. FWIW, you may not need to image anything. Install your old drive as a secondary disk, then just copy the data you want off it and onto your new disk.

Actually, you should be able to copy your stuff a bit more easily using the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard. Before you put the new drive in, run the Wizard and backup your data (emails, favorites, toolbars, files, etc) onto a CD or DVD using the wizard. Then, replace the disk, reinstall Windows and whatever programs you use, then restore your files and settings from the CD using the Wizard.

I would still recommend hooking up your old hard drive as a secondary, since you'll inevitably forget some files, and then you can just copy them from drive to drive using Windows Explorer.

Hope that helps,

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Carl Fisher

Be Cool to the Pizza Dude:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... Id=4651531

FAST is wonderful, but be careful. If there is anything that you suspect might be messed up as far as configurations are concerned, then they'll come over with the transfer and you'll see the same problems on the new drive. You can customize it to pick only what you want to come over to limit the amount of contamination, but if you're doing that you might as well just slave the drive and pull over data at your leisure like mentioned by Donnie.

I upgraded with a larger Maxtor hard drive. It came with with software to alow me to transfer my files. Just before I put in the drive I had upgraded the OS so I did an image transfer.

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George Bright Member # 141
One of the youngest of the old farts.
Yes I voted against you joining the club.

g4u

Only use it if you are comfortable with a command line. If so, it's very easy, powerful, and free.

Thanks for the suggestions. The XP install on this PC is only 9 months old and is behaving well so far, so I might just try transferring the existing image to a new drive. Assuming the transfer copies the hidden rapid restore partition, I'll be able to restore the original C drive image if it starts exhibiting old-windows disease. I've already got my mail and other files backed up to an external drive.

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Art McDonald
Premier Amateur #518
2008 Dishman Cup
Pivot Cone Snob

Rodney is a waxer (but in a good way)