Copying one drive faithfully to a newer one.

It has been my experience that Norton Ghost was the only program that faithfully copied one drive to another. Over the years, whenever I purchased a retail boxed harddrive, be it WD or Maxtor, it would come with either a floppy or a CD with "tools" on them. Copying the old drive to the new one using either company's supplied software never worked-the number of bytes on the source and destination drives never matched, even though I'd get a "successfully copied" message from the software. Only Norton's ghost never failed me.
I now have a computer with no floppy drive. It has an Asus A8Ne motherboard that can accept 4 SATA drives and 4 EIDE drives. I have Windows XP installed on the 74gig Raptor drive(SATA), and Vista on a 120gig EIDE WD Caviar. I want to copy the 74gig Raptor to a 150 gig Raptor that I just purchased.
I still have all of my old floppies, but no longer have a floppy drive.
Is there a program out there, that can be burned to a CD, so that I could select the CD drive as first boot and then go from there?
I still have a CD called Norton System Works Professional Edition 2001. Exploring the contents of the CD shows a Ghost folder with a bunch of files in it, one of which is a setup.exe.
Inserting the CD into the CD drive gives me several options, among them is a "run programs from the CD ". Unfortunately, GHOST is not one of them.
Could someone tell me how I can copy one SATA drive to a new one? Thanks.

 

Hi Skaler,
I currently use Seagates free version of Acronis & it works fine, Maxtor may have similar, But I believe that BBS members can buy Acronis True Image at a discount price at the moment, why not give that a go
Regards Jac

 

I finally got some time off work to try and copy the 74gig Raptor to the 150gig. No luck. I spent perhaps 3 hours and about 6 phone calls to Western Digital's Tech Supp, with no luck. They had me download a 29meg zip file that I could burn an ISO image from, to a CD. It had everything I needed, but no matter which option I tried- "drive setup" or partition copy from the Utilities section, I get :" An error occurred during the file copy process. Not all files were copied from the source to the destination drive." This message pops up after only about two seconds into the file copy process. I am not convinced that I downloaded the correct zip file. I did it twice, and burned two different CDs. The title and it's description don't match on WD's site. It says the CD will have a disk to disk copy routine on it. No such option ever showed up. It also described itself as a Windows and DOS disk, written for WD EIDE drives, even though to get to it, you have to click through internal SATA, then through RAPTOR(the second time I chose RAPTOR X). Same file.
My neighbor let me extract a floppy drive from his spare computer, so I gave Norton Ghost 2002 a shot. It had previously worked-about a year ago-when I copied an EIDE drive to this 74gig Raptor. This time, it ran for about 30 minutes, the progress bar got to about 92% complete, with less than 2 minutes to go, I got :" An internal Inconsistency has been detected. If the problem persists, contact Symantec ". Clicking OK brings up the black DOS screen with: "ABORT 25003. Could not fit translated attributes into buffer size. Abort details output to GHOSTERR.TXT. Please contact Symantec Tech Supp." I did this twice too-with essentially the same result at essentially the same point. After the first abort, I looked at the 150 gig drive under Windows, My Computer, Properties. It showed it to be a 74 gig drive with about 46gigs used. I reformatted it under Windows and made the second attempt, with the same result, as I said.
I'm at a loss as to how to proceed. I do have a Western Digital Diagnostic disk, and a "Quick Scan "(5 minutes) resulted in no errors found on the 150 gig drive. I'll see if I can't download Seagate's ACRONIS, and see how that goes. More to come... In the meantime, thanks for the support.

 

A quick look at Seagate Acronis shows that the computer must have at least one Seagate or Maxtor Brand drive installed. Bummer. All of mine are Western Digitals. Oh well, back to the telephone and the folks at WD.

 

Are both of the drives NTFS?

Is there some reason why either of these will not work?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XCOPY
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robocopy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volume_Shadow_Copy

 

I have good news. I downloaded the freebie Acronis product that Seagate offers. It does demand that you have at least one Seagate drive, and I imagine a Maxtor one will do, installed. I did have an external Seagate drive the I connected through the USB port. It copied the 74gig Raptor to the 150 gig one without a hitch. Thus far, I rebooted to the 150, got to WinXP just fine. Took a brief tour of the internet. All seems fine. If I come across any glitches, I'll post them here. I don't know why Western Digital's Utilities, or Norton Ghost 2002 failed. WD and Maxtor's Utilities that came with the retail versions of their drives NEVER cloned a drive for me in the past 10 years or so. On the other hand, this is the first time that Ghost failed.

 

I downloaded the Acronis program per
http://www.windowsbbs.com/general-discussions/76902-acronis-true-image-11-home-9-99-until-sept-19-a.html
and cannot get it to work. Unfortunately, I just discovered from reading this forum that the reason is that I am trying to backup to a Western digital drive.

I do have a smaller Maxtor and will try that. I did email Acronis a week ago or so and they never bothered to respond to my email. Told them that I could not get the Drive Image program to work even sent the log to them.

Also, in the documentation they do not list this restriction.

At least now I know why it did not work.
Thanks for these forums.

 

If their are any restrictions / requirements in using the above imaging / cloning programs (per HDD brand), they would only appear in free Seagate/Acronis download/CD utility programs. Both companies are independent of each other and have been around for years. Seagate first started using stripped down Acronis products about 3 years ago.

 

hello skaler2k. This may not be quite what you are needing, but try setting new drive up as slave and run xxClone. It also has option to make target disk bootable to use as backup.

 

Hi, Thanks. Is xxClone a part of Windows, or is it a commercial product. It's been a couple of weeks now, and the free Acronis appears to have cloned the drive correctly.
I did have some errors, but am not sure if it wasn't just coincidental. Chkdsk/f cleared them up.
Thanks again.

 

xxClone

hello again. No. xxClone is freeware. Just Google search and you can find it. Cannot remember where I downloaded from.

 

I have used xxclone for this purpose, I created exact copy of boot drives on 2 of my PC's, there was no problem booting, it all worked flawlessly. I recommend xxclone.