Ghosting Hard Disks

I need to be able to duplicate hard disks completely. I want to be able to insert a second drive in a PC - either IDE or SATA - and transfer a complete mirror copy of the boot disk to the second drive so that when I put the second drive in another pc as the master it will boot and have all the capabilities of the original PC. I would like to be able to ghost from one HDD to a second HDD and have the two HDDs with different capacity. An example might be to ghost from a 10 Gig HDD to a 160 Gig HDD.

These new PCs do not have any use other that running the Folding@home client. They all use MS Windows now but will be converting to a free Linux soon.

Can anyone suggest an application that can ghost from one HDD to another HDD of a different size? I just purchased Norton Ghost and will try that as soon as it arrives.

 

most of 3d party backup progs can ghost from one HDD to another HDD of a different size. if you have already bought norton ghost, then use it, if you not, i'd suggest true image, to my mind some years ago NG was a very good prog, but now it looses its positions, i prefer to use True Image. You can get True Image version 7 for free here:
http://www.acronis.com/mag/vnu-ati7

also i think it's useful to read this article about norton ghost and true image:
http://www.techsupportalert.com/drive-imaging-reviews.htm

and here is a test of True Image 7, i think it's interesting:
http://forums.hardwarezone.com/showthread.php?t=1442933&page=1&pp=15

 

I have been reading about True Image and thought that might be the way to go. I will download it and give it a try. Thanks for the link and the information. This is such a great site for us wanna-be geeks!!

 

You can use the HDD Manufactures free Utility to make an exact copy of your HDD ( this will work even for drive's of two different manufactures just use the Utility of the drive your transferring too)
The HDD size doesn't matter as long as the data will fit (ya cant put 80gb of data on 40gb drive )
You can change partition sizes during the process
You can copy a bootable HDD
or just an Exact Duplicate

When you purchase retail HDD's these utilities usually come with the HDD on CD, if you purchase OEM no CD, they are available as free download at the Manufactures Web site
WD is DataLifeGuard Tools
Maxtor is MaxtBlast
Seagate I believe is Seatools

Lets see, I think Ghost & Acronis True Image are up to version 10, not free though

 

I have been playing around with different programs and I found True Image V10 to be the best in my opinion. I had no problem doing exactly what I wanted and the program has so many other features.

I also use it for backing up my HDD. It is so much better than the Microsoft Back-up utility in XP.

 

Informative thread - I learned alot. Thanks to all!
Blessings,
Jim

 

Hi Cherokee,

The only thing you really need to be concerned about is that the computer you will be putting the "Ghosted" HD into has the EXACT same hardware as the computer you Ghosted it from.

In other words, same MB, same chipset, same video card etc., etc.

 

Adding drivers is much easier and faster than doing a complete install of an OS. So far TrueImage has worked extremely well and I can move it from one computer unlike Norton products. After some number of activations the Norton web site makes you call and explain why you have made multiple installations of the product.

When you are constantly ungrading and reconfiguring your drive comfiguration like I do, you reinstall applications often.