Ghost/Clone Hard Drive?

[Deffen-Baugh]

Hi, i am using a desktop running with Windows Vista. It was earlier running on XP with just 80GB hard drive. I upgraded from XP to Vista on the same hard drive and now facing storage shortest. Hence bought a new 320GB HDD, ready to go. But the problem i am facing now is i dont want to install both the drives. Hence i was looking for any kind of tool, application or manual way using which i can create a complete ghost/clone of my current hard drive including entire operating system and Softwares so that i can easily move it on the new Hard Drive without re-install Windows.

Is it possible? If yes, please let me know how. Many thanks.

[Oshea]

What is the Brand of the new Hard Drive you bought? I am asking this because most of the hdds today come with built-in software to clone the old hard drive with the new one. For example, if you have one from whitebox then you can go to their Manufacturer's website and download the free cloning utility.Alternate way for doing the same is third party software called "Acronis True Image"

This is a very well known cloning application. It also provides lot of useful stuffs like imaging and incremental backups. It is paid but i think it is worth and you should go for the same.

[RaAbi]

Obviously Vista or any Windows version wont have any such feature built-in. But as Oshea said most of the drives use to come with such softwares. If the one you bought is not having, no problem, you can download it from its manufacturer's website. But i have a small confusion. Why dont you want to install both the hard drives on your desktop? I mean it will save your reformatting time as well as you will get higher space, more 80GB which totals up to 400GB. That will be far good i think.

[karrma]

Acronix is surely a better option but Ghost too works fine. I use Ghsot since years for cloning up my PC images. It also works good with Vista. Apart from these, the third option i can suggest is Powerquest Drive Image. Google for the same.

[Deffen-Baugh]

hello RaAbi, let me clear your confusion. The reason i dont want to install both the drives is as of now my Operating system is installed on the older 80Gb hard drive. It is very old and obviously very slow. My hard drive is 50 times faster than that and hence i want to move my Vista on the new hard drive. As far as storage is concerned, i will think about adding 80GB hard drive later but as of now moving vista to the newer hard drive is important.

[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

[Andrus K]

One of my friend is using Casper 5 disk-cloning program and is working fine on Windows Vista. Even i have used it and found it very effective, useful and simple to use. i can say it is the best program for backing up & restoring one's system. It allows you to option what amounts to a precise copy of one's day-to-day working HDD, i.e., the "source" disk. It copys each and everything from you hard drive and restores the same on any drive you want. You should Google the same and download.

[Kazek]

does acronis true image is a windows 7 ready? can it clone windows 7 os?