Ghost/Clone Hard Drive?

Recently i bought a new HD, 320GB, i´m currently using a 80GB.
My question is if there is any tool on vist to make a ghost/clone my
current OS & Software on the new HD?

If not, what program i should use?

This will make a perfect copy 1:1 right?

Most hard drives come with the software to clone the old hard drive to the
new one. If you bought whitebox, you can always go to the drive mftr.'s
website and download this free utility.

Otherwise, Acronis True Image can clone hard drives - as well as doing a lot
of very useful things like imaging and incremental backups - so it might be
worth having in your toolbox. I'm sure other imaging programs like Ghost
can do this, too.

Several points:

1. There is no Vista tool to do this.

2. Most new drives either come with such a tool, or you can download
one from the drive manufacturer's web site.

3. If you want to buy such a tool, there are several choices. My
favorite is Acronis true Image.

4. Why do you want to do this at all? It's easier to just install the
new 320GB as a second drive and keep both. Then you end up with a
total of 400GB instead of 320GB.

Likely because most 80Gig HDD's are now coming up on three to four years of
age, so reliability becomes
more of a concern, as well as the fact that most 80Gig units have a 2Mb L2
cache whereas almost all 320Gig units have a 16Mb cache and have a
noticeably faster "feel".

Ghost works fine, I use it for all my PC images. You can also use Powerquest
Drive Image

thanks all for the answer.
the reason why i want to do it, is because my old hd is very old, it´s
not as fast as my new HW so i really need to move my OS to the new HW.

I´ll try to download the app from the website (it´s samsung drive btw)
Or i should use the original HD? (old one?)

if i can´t find it, i´ll search for a 3rd party application then.

Copy it over to the new one and use the old drive for backup or data.
Acronis has good products and just make sure anything you need to run on
Vista is Vista compatible.

What version of Vista? Of Ghost? Have you done any file or complete
restores?

[jobypolansky]

I assisted a friend in cloning a Vista HDD from a 80GB disk to a 250 solid state disk. I used Spotmau Clone Genius but while the clone did the job correctly, swapping out the hard drives - the new drive was not bootable.

To get around this, and after pulling my hair out, I first closed the WHOLE disk, then cloned the bootable partition from the old disk to the new one (again, even though it was already there).

I then swapped the drives and the new 250GB disk worked. Ironically, putting the old disk back in, I got the same error message that I got the first time around with the new disk! Weird. After that, I took the unallocated space from the new 250GB (what was left) and merged it with the main c: partition taking advantage of all the space available from the new drive.

So in summary, clone the whole disk incluiding all partitions from source to new drive. THEN, clone the boot partition again to the new drive, then swap them out.

Unfortunately, it appears that the old c: drive won't boot so you might as well format it and use it for extra space.

I don't know why Microsoft Vista does this, but having cloned Win98, XP, etc, I was not expecting to run into this problem. Somehow, almost by accident, we managed to do it. Hopefully, it will work for you too! PJP

Difficult , but doable (if that is a word). Check out this link:
http://www.microsoft.com/communities...&cr=&sloc=&p=1

As I understand it, lots of cloning programs tend to make the new disk not
bootable, since two bootable drives in one computer could be a problem. If
you tell the program to make the new drive bootable, it often makes the old
one unbootable, for the same reason.

This is all very interesting for me. I ran into exactly the same
problem trying to clone Vista from my HDD to an OCZ SSD using Norton
Ghost. There was always something wrong with the boot record. But I
never tried to clone it twice (neat trick).
Does anybody have any references that describes this problem (and
solution) in more detail.

You might try looking into the PDF manuals for cloning programs, such as
Casper, and maybe partitioning
software, which, IIRC, faces the same conundrum.

I would strongly second Gene's suggestion to take a look at the Casper 5
disk-cloning program. We have been using that program for about the past two
years or so and have found it a superb program for backing up & restoring
one's system. While we have used the program primarily in a Windows XP
environment and have had limited personal experience with the Vista OS,
we're aware of many Vista users who have informed us that the program works
just as well with that OS as with the XP OS.

As I'm sure you know, like any disk-cloning program, the program is a
comprehensive backup program in that it creates what amounts to a precise
copy of one's day-to-day working HDD, i.e., the "source" disk. As such the
user has available to him or her a complete copy of one's system including
the OS, all programs & applications, all personal data - in short,
*everything* that's on the source HDD. So when the day comes when the system
requires restoration because of a failed HDD or a unbootable, dysfunctional
OS, the user has the wherewithal immediately at hand to restore his or her
system with little fuss or an inordinate expenditure of time.

Been using Casper for quite a while and it does a great job on my Winn2000
and WinXP boxes. However it didn't play well with my Vista or Win 7
machines. Problems with Shadow Copy errors never gave me a clean accurtate
cloned disc. So I use DiscCopy 2.3 for Vista and Win7 and get good results
although it takes longer than if I were using Casper. BTW DiscCopy 2.3 is
free,

As I indicated in my post above I've had limited experience using Casper 5
with the Vista OS, but the few dozen times I've used that disk-cloning
program with various machines that had Vista installed the program worked
flawlessly; just about the same as it has in an XP OS environment. And from
the numerous reports I've gotten from friends & former customers who
routinely use Casper 5 in a Vista OS environment they've informed me their
experience parallels mine.

Why Casper 5 didn't "play well" in your situation is obviously impossible
for me to tell.

As to the DiscCopy program you recommend, while I'm not familiar with that
program by all means a user seeking a comprehensive backup program that one
will be employing routinely should take a look at it as well as other
similar programs available as freeware or demo versions.

In fact, Acronis and Macrium can both do incremental (& differential)
backups, with the added property that you can see earlier versions of files
as well as the current version. This is not exactly an unusual property of
backup software.

However, these are not clones but proprietary images, requiring the
creating program to view and restore them. BTW, in my experience, Macrium's
images are read-only, so Vista can not take ownership of them. At least I
couldn't figure out how to read certain directories without logging on as
root (UNIX slang for the real administrator). Acronis also has permission
problems, although I think that if I mount its image read/write it would be
OK - but I haven't tested that property.

I used a test version of Shadow Protect Desktop, similar to the above two,
which did much better at permissions that they do. But it's expensive and
you need to buy ten copies before you get a license discount :-(

Next thing you should learn is how to trim a post!