Ghost NT system partition and resize

[pgeorger]

I have a question about increasing the size of my C: drive on our PDC. Currently, the system has one hard drive, broken up into C: and D: partitions. The C: partition is only 2GB and is nearly full and D: takes up the rest of the 40GB drive. What I would like to do is clone the C: partition to another drive, expand it to a larger size, and then get rid of the old partition so that the system runs off the newly "ghosted" drive partition. I'm guessing I would use Norton Ghost, but I have a couple of issues. One, I created an NT partition on the new drive using NT's Disk Administrator. NT called it F:. Now, if I clone the C: drive to this F: partition, how do I turn the F: into C: so that I can use it as the new system partition? Also, I set up the partition as the entire 40GB drive for the new F:. Will Ghost use this partition size if I clone the C: partition, or will it make it 2GB? Please help! I have an application that must reside on the C: drive and I'm out of room! Thanks.

 

[PHILANDO]

Your best is to use a new version of Norton GHost (7.5 or above). Do not assign a drive letter to the new drive (you can remove in disk administrator. Make a ghost boot disk and restart computer with it. You will be able to choose the source disk/partition and all available disk in the system will be showed as possible targets. Make sure you take a note of the volume name so you dont make a mistake of cloning the wrong drive (even though the master will be listed as 1 and slave as 2).
I am pretty sure disk adminstrator will not allow you to resize the system partition, but other disk utilities will do it (like disk wizard or partition magic). Go to the drive manufacturer's website and you should be able to download for free.

If the ghost only use 2GB when you go from partition to disk then you could make a clone of the complete drive and use partition magic blow away the d drive and extend c to the full disk. Test out the different senario after hours ...the cloning is fast.
I use ghost to image the differnt flavors of dell workstation in this site. I use the ghost cast server to reload machines at the users desk. It takes 10 or less to do an image via network.

 

[wolluf]

Acronis Partition Expert will allow you to resize partitions on NT Server (Partition Magic won't - though its rescue disk will work as booting from floppy).

Also - the partition on new drive only appears as F: in the current setup. If you use ghost to overwrite this with the ghost image, and then make drive master, it should boot as C: (and if it doesn't, disk adminstrator in NT will allow you to change the system drive letter - unlike 2k/XP).

 

[work2much]

When you resize your partitions, do not attempt to resize your c: drive any larger than 7.8 GB. For more info, refer to Microsoft KB Q224526. Because the files on your c: drive needed for initial system startup (Ntdetect.com, NTLDR, Boot.ini, and sometimes ntbootdd.sys) and also (in most cases) the HAL, kernel, and boot-start device drivers must all reside on the first 1024 cylinders of the hard drive.