HDD Transfer/Copy

[<eVa>Verman]

Fellow Mad Scientists!
Over the years I've built many a system for myself and family with moderately high degrees of success. Most of them have been new components/new OS, etc.
What I've never done, and am wondering what others do is to replace HDD's by way of a copy or transfer from a smaller soon-2-fail HDD to a newer, more spacious model without having to reload everything from scratch.
I know there's Norton Ghost software, but wonder if there's another option.

The ailing system has a mirrored pair of WD 80GB SATA HDD's, but signs are that they will soon become paperweights.
Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Thanks

[mr_s]

um.

never actualy had to ghost, so not much experience in that.


i would say transfer everything manually, but thats gonna take a lot of time

[dredfox]

I do this frequently at work. You can use a the program "dd" in Linux to do this. If you don't know much about Linux though, it may be better to get a commercial alternative. "dd" is a command line tool that has no graphical interface; everything is text based. What you want can be done, but it may not be easy at all. Let me know if you want more information. All I can recommend besides this is Acronis True Image or Ghost.

[Archon]

some hd manufacturers have similar software, you may want to check the site of the new drive you are gonna use. i remember maxtor had dos based software they used to include with retail boxed drives that would copy sector by sector when installing one of their drives, basically exactly what ghost does, only simpler

[Boss Llama]

I'm pretty sure you can just use the Command Prompt "XCOPY" command here.

-Attach new HDD to system

-Open Command Prompt

-Use the XCOPY command to copy the entire source disk to the current one. Supposing your old HDD is c:\ and the new HDD is s:\, for example, format would be "xcopy c:\ s:\ /s /e /h" That tells the system to duplicate (XCOPY) the old HDD (c:\) to the new HDD (s:\), including all directories and files (/s), even if empty (/e), and regardless of being hidden or system files (/h)

I'm not sure if this would retain key-coded installations in such a way that you don't have to re-enter the key code the first time you use the program, nor would I wager on Steam working properly (it's stupidly sensitive, you can't even move it around on your own computer without it breaking itself), but it should preserve the directory structure and the actual installed files of everything without issue, to the best of my knowledge.


If XCOPY isn't available (it's been a long time since I studied command prompts, but I think XCOPY is not always around), the COPY command should work. I believe the format would be "COPY /A: c:\*.* s:\" That tells the system to duplicate (COPY), regardless of attribute (/A:), from old HDD (c:\) all files (*.*) to the new HDD (s:\). Same disclaimer as XCOPY

[mujo]

I used Acronis once and it seemed to do the job nicely.

[<eVa> + Sarge +]

I remember getting a dos based program with WD HD and it worked great. Copied everything to new bigger drive. And it works with any HD. It was on a diskette. Probably free somewhere.

[Stevo]

[quote="mujo";p="129661"]I used Acronis once and it seemed to do the job nicely.[/quote]
Same here. Acronis True Image will duplicate a drive and resize your partitions to fit the larger drive. It's also good for making backups.

[PhantomFighter]

I also want to suggest the use of Acronis. I use it for regular backups. You can get it from True Image site. They also offer a 15-day free trial.

I just used it for something akin to what you're doing. In this case I was working with a laptop that does not accommodate dual hard drives So I did a full backup (Windows partitions + Linux LVM partition) to an external USB hard drive. Then I replaced the internal drive, booted from the Acronis CD and restored each partition, resizing each to end up filling the new larger drive. If you're only dealing with standard partitions (FAT/32, NTFS, ext2/3, reiserfs) you can restore all of them and resize them in one shot. (Since I was using an LVM partition, Acronis could only do a sector-by-sector backup since it doesn't know how to interpret the data in the partition.)

The really nice thing is that it does full backups in incremental or differential mode, allowing for a mirror-restore; but you can also just go back and find a particular file if you so desire.

TPF

[dredfox]

[quote="Alizée Fan";p="129658"]I'm pretty sure you can just use the Command Prompt "XCOPY" command here.[/quote]

XCOPY is still around. It won't copy the boot sector of the drive, so the new drive won't be bootable without additional work. Also, some system files cannot be copied. It isn't a wise idea to use this if you need a perfect working copy of the software. If this meets the needs though try this:

xcopy /C /E /H C:\* X:\*

Where X:\ is the target drive. Note that this does not verify that each file is intact and a perfect copy; that's why it is so fast.

Check here for more info on XCOPY.

[Boss Llama]

Ah, didn't think about the boot sector. Thanks for the info dredfox.