[RESOLVED] is it possible to transfer WINDOWS from one hard drive to another?

[tshano]

I have an old hard drive which has windows98 and all my files. I want to transfer it to my new 60GIG hard drive. Is it possible?

[iateyourcat]

typically, the new drive will come with ezdrive or something like that if it's not an oem drive.

if you don't have that, buy/download yourself a personal version of Norton Ghost from symantec.. it's about $39 US.

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=-iateyourcat-=

[AlienDyne]

Yep. Norton Ghost would be the best choice.

At least, that's what I do when need to transfer data from one drive to another.

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"Matter is passive. In spite of its power, it can't be controlled without the human mind." Sokrates

My Hardware Info, Hardware Media and Computer History page

[StevePorter]

Ghost is great, but I also bought a rather inexpensive utility called DriveCopy v3.0 from PowerQuest. It worked great for just what you're doing, and was cheaper and much easier to use than Ghost (that comment will solicit a few responses, I'm sure...). Anyway, that's my recommendation...

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You want the right answer?!? You must be asleep, 'cuz you're dreamin'...

[Andi]

Have a look on the harddrive manufaturers website under tools,theres usually a freeware file copy tool for such occasions made to work on there own harddrives only.

[Marky man]

Another possibility if you have both drives in the machine is to copy the entire windows directory without the swap-file (.swp) from c to d or whatever your driveletters are. Then just copy the rest. (select swp file, make inverse selection and copy. then select windows directory reverse selection and copy the rest, or manually copy what you need). If you have a Norton or simular program then thats probably your best choice.

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Beauty lies

[NPaladin]

DriveCopy is OK, but PartitionMagic will do the same thing, only better. Oh, and I'd watch it with EZ-Drive....I've had trouble with it sometimes (last I knew, DiskManager/DiskGo didn't have a copy utility....or was it the other way around? I don't think so)

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Bryan Pizzuti
CompTIA A+, CNAP
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[techs]

Make sure whichever utility you use that it supports 60 GB size drives!!! I think even fdisk needs help on drives that large.

[Jeff the Brit]

Cheapskates like me use xcopy with a bunch of command line switches. Works on every hard drive upgrade I do. Not as quick as the commercially available progs though.

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Still scrambling up the learning curve ...

[Gimpy]

Run scandisk to fix any errors and hook up both drives and run from a DOS PROMPT, not true dos, xcopy32 c:\*.* d: /h/c/e/k

This willl copy over all files except .swp which windows will recreate.

Done this many times myself

[Riteous]

Thanks for some great ideas from this post guys. I just thought that I'd let anyone know who is interested how to get a FULL version copy of Norton System Works 2001 (with Ghost) for around US$30 including shipping (STATESIDE). Multiwave direct (Mwave.com) sells the Profesional Oem version for $21. The only requirement is that you purchase "hardware" with it but hardware can be a $5 item. It doesn't come with the manuals but you can get them in PDF form for free, or order them from the site for pretty cheap if I recall.

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