how can I copy C: to another drive and still boot it?

[silverspecv]

Is it still possible to copy the contents of a boot partition to another drive and then boot it, kinda like back in msdos copying the c: and the "sys" the drive to make it bootable? Can I copy a win2k c: drive and make it bootable? I tried ghost, but I dunno if the drive is too fragmented, or if it's trying to be too slick for its own good with some goofy sector by sector shenanigans or what, but the time starts at about 1 hour, whcih is reasonable for just under 7gigs of data, and then as the hour rolls by it goes up and up and up.. I finally got mad and reboot the server after one hour, and it said it had 7+ hours remaining, and the "time remaining" was still getting higher.. I messed with ghost switches all night, and I'm sick of it. Even if it works, I don't even want to hear about it. I'd rather spend 2 hours and know it will work than spend 5 hours to do it in one hour. Is it possible to do this the old fashioned way?

 

[Santei]

What a horrible story! I condole with you.
I've never thought that such terrible thing might exist.
Becouse I recently made simular modification with my PC.
I need to copy my win200 partition to another hard disk (in case to boot, when it's master), and install XP.
But I use Acronis Disk director for it.
So it took me about 30-40 min to copy my full 30GB OS partition. I just click copy partition and select on which one, I want. After that press commit and reboot PC.
Everythig was clear and fast, also it has OS selector where you could chose which OS should boot.
My favourite tool in this program is that I can resize partitions as I need. I can even shrink current active OS partition.
I don't think that you could do the same in MSDOS.

 

[silverspecv]

30-40 minutes to duplicate 30 gigs of data? Sorry, I'm not buying that, but I will look at the software anyway.

But I still want to know if it can be done the old manual way. Even if it is possible, I suspect that there are files that need to be located in the first sector of the partition, or other requirements like that.