Copying a hard drive

[bubarooni]

I need to make an exact copy of an NT 4.0 Workstation's existing IDE drive over to a new, larger hard drive. This workstation has an extremely critical application and associated data files on it. The current drive is FAT32 and has two partitions, C: and D:.

I want to take the newly copied hard drive and upgrade it to WIN2K. The theory is, if the upgrade process blows up on me I can throw the original drive back in and have the pharmacy up and running again in no time without the need to try and restore from the crappy back up system the workstation has.

What is the best way to achieve this. I have heard bad things about some disk copying programs and wondered whether anyone here has experience with this scenario on NT 4.0 workstations.

Thanks in advance for any insight or tips.

 

[TheLad]

You can use a product like Norton Ghost or Powerquest Drive Image Pro which are both good products and widely used by many people on these forums. -----------------------------------------------------
"It's true, its damn true!"
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[bubarooni]

Never have used one myself and just ain't to sure I understand what the heck a 'image' is. Is it some kind of compressed form of the drive? I need a bit for bit copy.

 

[pxb006]

Ghost is fairly easy to use and I have always had a lot of luck with it. It basicly takes a picture of your hard drive and copies it to another. You can compress the "image" if you like, but this isn't a must.

 

[BlackburnKL]

PowerQuest Drive Image can create a compressed "image" of a hard drive to CD, another hard drive, etc. Images are great backups because they can be restored to get back to the point at which the image was made. It restores the registry and everything you need to run--not like a copy command from Explorer, etc. It will also let you restore individual files from an image.

Drive Image can also do a copy directly from one hard disk to another without the intermediate image of the drive.

Drive Image is basically a partition copy/backup/restore utility.

And it works great for copying an existing hard drive to a newer, bigger one. It even handles resizing the partition on the new hard drive (to expand the partition to the whole larger drive) if you want. BlackburnKL