Vista - Ghost/Clone Hard Drive?

Hi,
Recently i bought a new HD, 320GB, i´m currently using a 80GB.
My question is if there is any tool on vist to make a ghost/clone my current OS & Software on the new HD?

If not, what program i should use?

This will make a perfect copy 1:1 right?

Thanks.

Most hard drives come with the software to clone the old hard drive to the
new one. If you bought whitebox, you can always go to the drive mftr.'s
website and download this free utility.

Otherwise, Acronis True Image can clone hard drives - as well as doing a lot
of very useful things like imaging and incremental backups - so it might be
worth having in your toolbox. I'm sure other imaging programs like Ghost
can do this, too.

Several points:

1. There is no Vista tool to do this.

2. Most new drives either come with such a tool, or you can download
one from the drive manufacturer's web site.

3. If you want to buy such a tool, there are several choices. My
favorite is Acronis true Image.

4. Why do you want to do this at all? It's easier to just install the
new 320GB as a second drive and keep both. Then you end up with a
total of 400GB instead of 320GB.

--
Ken Blake, Microsoft MVP - Windows Desktop Experience

Likely because most 80Gig HDD's are now coming up on three to four years of
age, so reliability becomes
more of a concern, as well as the fact that most 80Gig units have a 2Mb L2
cache whereas almost all 320Gig units have a 16Mb cache and have a
noticeably faster "feel".

Ghost works fine, I use it for all my PC images. You can also use Powerquest
Drive Image

Hope that helps

Claudia

thanks all for the answer.
the reason why i want to do it, is because my old hd is very old, it´s not as fast as my new HW so i really need to move my OS to the new HW.

I´ll try to download the app from the website (it´s samsung drive btw)
Or i should use the original HD? (old one?)

if i can´t find it, i´ll search for a 3rd party application then.

Copy it over to the new one and use the old drive for backup or data.
Acronis has good products and just make sure anything you need to run on
Vista is Vista compatible.

Claudia,
What version of Vista? Of Ghost? Have you done any file or complete
restores?

I assisted a friend in cloning a Vista HDD from a 80GB disk to a 250
solid state disk. I used Spotmau Clone Genius but while the clone did
the job correctly, swapping out the hard drives - the new drive was not
bootable.

To get around this, and after pulling my hair out, I first closed the
WHOLE disk, then cloned the bootable partition from the old disk to the
new one (again, even though it was already there).

I then swapped the drives and the new 250GB disk worked. Ironically,
putting the old disk back in, I got the same error message that I got
the first time around with the new disk! Weird. After that, I took the
unallocated space from the new 250GB (what was left) and merged it with
the main c: partition taking advantage of all the space available from
the new drive.

So in summary, clone the whole disk incluiding all partitions from
source to new drive. THEN, clone the boot partition again to the new
drive, then swap them out.

Unfortunately, it appears that the old c: drive won't boot so you might
as well format it and use it for extra space.

I don't know why Microsoft Vista does this, but having cloned Win98,
XP, etc, I was not expecting to run into this problem. Somehow, almost
by accident, we managed to do it. Hopefully, it will work for you too!
PJP

As I understand it, lots of cloning programs tend to make the new disk not
bootable, since two bootable drives in one computer could be a problem. If
you tell the program to make the new drive bootable, it often makes the old
one unbootable, for the same reason.

--
Gene E. Bloch letters0x40blochg0x2Ecom