Hard Drive Copy

I'm looking for a reliable, sure way of copying hard drive to hard drive. This includes: Operating System, Registry Files, EVERYTHING. I want to be able to switch my hard drives and have it act as if it were the original except with more space.

A little more in depth explanation:
I was given a 300gig hard drive for Christmas, so now I want my 40 gig HD(Has the OS on it) to transfer onto the 300 gig. I have a 150 gig HD in my computer currently, but I want that to stay as a storage drive. I'm going to hook up the 300 gig drive where the 150 is right now. Hopefully transfer EVERYTHING from the 40 gig HD to the 300 gig hard drive, Operating system and all. Then use my 300 gig in place of my 40 gig and put my 150 gig back where it originally was. It is VERY important that the Registry Files and the Operating System are copied.

I'm asking if anyone has had any experience with any HD copy programs and has had it work perfectly fine. If possible, I'd like the program to be free, if it's not, show me anyways. Right now I'm looking at a program from Norton called "Ghost". It seems like it will work, but I don't know if it will copy the OS and Registry files.

Thanks for your time.

Ghost copies everything. What ghost does is make an image of all your HD's contents (similar to CD burning images) and then stores that image as you see fit (or just ghosts it over to the other drive). Most "restore" partitions included in new PC's these days are just glorified ghost images, so when anything goes wrong the restore will just wipe the main partition and ghost in that same image.

Having used ghost myself, both at home and at work, I can safely say it will copy EVERYTHING.

I just read below about someone having Maxblast. My drive is a Maxtor, but I did not receive any software. Is it supposed to come with it? I can find a download for it I guess, but will it copy from a foreign hard drive? I.E. a non-maxtor (I think it's a Quantum Fireball..yeah, lol at that).

Yea it'll copy from a non maxtor drive, as far as I know it should copy from a non maxtor to a non maxtor just as well as long as you have 1 maxtor drive present. The software is optional as a download from internet.

Boot to Knoppix, open a terminal, and enter:
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb

That'll copy the first PATA drive to the second PATA drive bit-for-bit (even the boot sector!). Adjust as needed. PATA drives are addressed as /dev/hd<a-z> in order by drive chain and primacy; for example, if you have two full drive chains, the master drive on the primary chain is hda, the slave is hdb, the secondary master is hdc, and secondary slave is hdd. If a drive is missing, it's skipped (in other words, if you have only one drive on each of two chains, they'll be hda and hdb, not hda and hdc). To copy by partition, just add a number at the end (i.e., /dev/hda2 for the second partition on the primary master), but you'll have to create a partition on the target drive using parted or fdisk first.

Okay, so I made a huge mistake when using Norton's Ghost. It worked PERFECTLY. I mean everything works. It works just the same as I had it. Problem is that it's only 40 gigs. Yay! 40 gigs only of my beautiful 300 gig HD. :( I know what I did wrong though, there's an option that says to fill up all the unallocated space, and I didn't know what that meant until now. So if anyone plans on using Norton Ghost in the future, you need to use that option...now to format, and re-copy. Woohoo another 4 hours of waiting! <3

>>6

You Lol'd

4 hours? Norton Ghost is faster than that in my experience, even on fairly old hard drives and slow machines. I used it today to back up a 20Gb disk on a clunky 850MHz machine, and it took less than 20 minutes...

By the way, you could just resize the too-small partition using a partition manager program. Partition Magic is pretty good (though I've never tried it on 137+Gb hard disks, so I don't know whether it handles 48-bit LBA disks correctly).

Taking into consideration of formatting and re-copying the hard drive, it felt like 4 hours. It was 1 hour and 20 minutes to copy the HD.

I have a new problem though. I can't get my system to boot up on my new hard drive after copying the 40 gig to the 300 gig. It didn't work like the first time. I tried to format it through maxblast, but I'm not sure if I did it right. I've been frustrated with this all day and can't seem to get it to work like the first time. The first time it worked I never used Maxblast and copied HD to HD with absolutely nothing on the 300 gig...But then the mistake I made as said in my #6 comment, I had to do it again, so I used Maxblast this time.

After using maxblast to format the partitions in my 300 gig and format everything inside, I did the Ghost thing again. Booted it up, got my custom bootup picture up, but when it boots up in windows, it shows the Windows XP logo but doesn't go any further. I even gave it 30 minutes to think it had some kind of first special boot sequence..no go..

Is there a way to format a HD other than using a Windows disc and other than through CMD? I want the HD as clean as the manufacturer first made it..So maybe it will work when I copy the HD to it... :/ thanks.