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General discussion

Easiest way to image a notebook hard drive

Jan 3, 2005 1:34AM PST

Hi,
I have a 40Gb 4200 RPM drive in my laptop. I want to purchase a 60Gb 5400 and use that instead, but I want to copy or image the 60Gb drive with everything from the 40Gb (i.e WIndows XP, all my apps, data etc)

1) What is the easiest way that this can be done, bearing in mind that the file contents are greater than 10Gb ?
2) Is there any freeware software which will enable me to do this easily ?

Thanks
Richard

Discussion is locked

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You need external hard drive case and Symantec Ghost
Jan 3, 2005 9:46AM PST

You have to get an external case in order to copy the old hard drive to the new hard drive (if you are not just going to load the operating system on the hard drive and start from scratch). You would use Symantec Ghost or a similar program to easily transfer the data once you had one hard drive installed in an external hard drive case (hooked up via USB 2.0 or firewire).

The external cases are not that expensive and you can even use your old hard drive later this way to store video or music files, etc (but you can't boot off an external hard drive). See Newegg.com, etc for options .. you can seach at X1000forums.com (my user site) in the upgrades or technical areas for this topic.......

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Drive image is good too...
Jan 11, 2005 5:54PM PST

If most of your 40GB drive is empty you can compress an image onto second partition with Drive Image. Also Drive image can break up your image into CD sized chunks. Burn the images, install new HD, and restore the images to your new HD.

You will need Drive Image and Partitioning(if you don't have drive partitioned) software to do this. Oh a Foppy drive or USB drive to boot to restore the image (on my older version at least).

example: if you have 7 gig of your 40 gig drive used.

have a second partition of 10 gigs.

create image from 1 partition (compressed to 3.5 gigs)to the 2nd partition. You can have the 3.5gig file broken up by drive image into 700MB chunks to burn onto CD.

Create bootup flopyy to run drive image on your new HD.

Restore the CD images.

Done.

Not sure if Ghost will image from partition to partition on 1 HD.