Cloning a drive!

[Omen109]

Hey all,
Yesterday my 40gb western digital started to give me some major warning signs of impending death. Whilst watching a dvd it crashed and the header started making some nasty clickin sounds, it tried to boot several times revving up and down then finally when it managed, my xp was corrupted. Through a lengthy retrieval procedure with the repair sequence and restore points its back to normal.

As a precaution I have now bought a brand spanking 120gb serial ata drive and its all set up as disk 'I' (I have other hard drives and tings too)

Now currently the western digital drive is the C: with XP installed. Now if i want to make I my C: i don't wanna have to reinstall all the programs on all my other drives that are referenced by XP etc.

So how do I make an exact copy of C: onto I: (which is empty) then swap the drive letters around so I becomes C (still with me?)

an exact replica.

because I am gonna chuck out this WD and I want my new Sata to be the C: without having to reinstall everything. I know there are programs that can do this but I can't seem to find the names of them clearly enuff on google.

Could anyone here help me out?

thanks guys!

[Yawgm0th]

I guess you could get some program to do it (search Google), or, if you set it so that hidden files are visible, you could manually copy everything over (which I wouldn't suggest). Then you use disk managment (start, run, diskmgmt.msc) to set the new drive as C: and the old drive as something else, like J:(which might not even work, anyway). But that's a really bad idea; unless the drive is the same or very similar (which it isn't), that can cause big driver problems, among others. Your in best shape with a reformat and reinstall. You can back up your programs, and many of them will work. Some may need to be reinstalled because of registry entries, however. This can be countered by exporting your current registry entries for your programs (most should be in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software and HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software) and then importing them into your new registry after the reinstall. But this won't work with some programs (mainly ones that have entries in places other than what I just mentioned), and reinstalling them will get the best results.

Edit: I'm not clear on your situation, but if your old drive isn't SATA then the following is irrelevant:
Also, if these drives are on the same channel and are different speeds, the channel should run at the slower one's speed (unless SATA is way different then what I thought), so if the 40GB is slower, best to move to a different channel or get it out of there.

[Wiggo]

Norton's Ghost could do the job but if ya SATA controller isn't incorporated into the southbridge like the i865 and i875 chipsets then it won't work as the SATA controller driver will need to be incorporated into the Windows setup which will mean a clean install.

[Omen109]

Update:

My SATA Maxtor 120gb is set up using partition magic as drive I: with one huge partition

In partition magic u can copy an entire partition over drives and it will auto adjust your current partitions to compensate and be identical, but I got an error when trying it. I stupidly forgot to write it down so I might try again. The thing is, there will be errors anyway because I'm going to be copying a partition with XP on, something it won't like. So I need a workaround...it can be done but I'm just too tired stressed and lacking in knowledge of this area.

Anyone else

[Beefy]

What version of PM have you got?

[Omen109]

PM version 8

the error i get is

Batch(1611) bad system filename, file 9(48)

any ideas??

*UPDATE*

Solved that problem by deleting the SATA partition and copying it then.

BUT!! a new error occurs during the copy

49 percent into the partition copy I got an error:

(122) A Bad sector was found in the current or new partition

Since the sata is brand spanking new, and I think my original drive might be dying (hence the need to back up) I can pretty much assume its the c: drive with the bad sector.

The thing is I'm a complete noob when it comes to these things, so can anyone recommend a course of action?

is there a way to possibly bypass the bad sector then deal with the consequences later?

thanks peeps

[asklepios]

i would not be too sure that a new drive can't have Bad Sectors. though it is highly unlikely but still you should not take it for granted. check your drive for errors.
use chkdsk /R on your old drive and it will try to recover as much data as possible from that bad sector. it will also mark that sector not to be used so you might be able to clone your drive.
btw using a specialist program to clone the drive is always recommended. i personally use Acronis' softwares but Norton Ghost is also a well known program.

[Darthtanion]

I generally use Norton myself. It creates a perfect copy and is accurate enough to have been certified in court as giving a 100% true copy of the original device from a forensics specialist's point of view. Different commands and options will let you decide how you want the data copied; either byte-for-byte or sections of the drive/partition.

[Omen109]

hmms ok thanks for the responses.

but what about the bad sectors? chkdsk doesnt find any and is a pretty badly made program cos it reports nothing. Scandisk used to be much better.

There a way I can get a better scan done? does that norton ghost come with scanners too?

sorry for the bombardment of questions...its just i only have a month left b4 I have to hand in my uni project and I live in fear that my HD is gonna die and im gonna have to reinstall everything costing me a lot of priceless time(i have too much stuff)

[minibubba]

There a way I can get a better scan done

go to the WD website and download their diagnostic software, then run it

http://support.wdc.com/download/#diagutils

[Omen109]

I've tried that and it doesn't work. The program doesn't load. My maxtor program doesn't load either its well strange.

Someone said that norton ghost can clone a drive even if it has bad sectors? is this true???

[asklepios]

yup it is but it won't recover any lost data because of bad sectors.

[Omen109]

i don't need to recover anything, thankfully my hard drive is working perfectly fine, I can just tell its dying, so i need to clone it to save me having to reinstall everything.

Oh another question, how do you set an sata drive as the boot drive?

thanks for your help I really appreciate it

[Darthtanion]

As long as the drivers are set up on the system, you should simply be able to change the boot sequence within BIOS. If there is a choice for booting from the SATA drive, then you're set.

[Omen109]

I got norton ghost 7, but Its not very clear on how to use it. I just want to clone one drive to another....but its got all this aibuilder, enterprise stuff I really can't find any cloning options.

can anyone here help me out?