HDD Ghosting

[river]

Ok need some advice just purchased a new hard drive and I want to copy or ghost all the info off my old one including the OS the whole shooting match.

What's the best way to go about this other than purchasing the software eg. Norton Ghost or similar which I may do as a last resort if I have to, any ideas appreciated.

[stevem]

Personally I would be taking the opportunity to do a new install.

If not then, is this old drive the only one you use??
Is the old drive still OK??
Is the new drive larger??
What OS do you use??

[LivinLOS]

Drive image pro is my fave ghosting tool but I take the chance for a new install whenever I can.. Amazed at how much more zippy a new install is on the same hardware..

[river]

Yeah the old drive is ok the new one is larger and windows XP.

I have a motherload of programs on it though will a system restore load all these
up otherwise it will be very time consuming which is what I'm trying to avoid have all my documents and settings double backed up so I'm not worried about those.

I really just want to clone it if I can and reuse the old drive for storage.

[stevem]

If you dont want to fork out and buy something, have a look at 'xcopy'. Just make sure you have fully read about all the qualifiers and understand the ins and outs before using, but it will do the job for you.

[river]

Well what a disaster to cut a long story short I ghosted the HDD and all seemed fine so I deleted the old disk but the new ghosted copy was missing a critical file and wouldn't boot so I tryed to run recovery console but then it asked me for the password which I didn't know or wouldn't work and then it started to load windows on the same primary partition.

So I did a fresh install to get the PC to run on the original HDD and still can't get the other one to run which has a file missing plus a partial install on one primary partition.

Er any ideas Steve?

[stevem]

Dont run recovery console, use the step after that, I cant remember off hand whats its called, but it will verify your windows setup and will then install any missing or corrupted files. I cant remember, but you may have to reapply all updates and SP after doing this.