Hard Drive Question!

[Ezergeezer]

I'm getting two new 120gb hard drives, the question is, I want to to image my existing setup and copy to the one of the new drives! My system at the moment has a 60gb drive split into 20gb for c:/ and 40 for d:/.

When I copy contents of c:/ and D:/ to new drive, what happens to the space left over in the new drive? What will I have, C, D, and ,'E' partitions?

 

[Xie]

I believe you would have to create partitions on the new 120gb drive the same size as the ones you wanna copy. Then you would have to image those to those partitions and then afterwards you can expand them to whatever size.

 

[ming]

You can always using something like Norton Ghost to create image files. Make the partitions on your new drive(s) then restore those images on to the newly created partitions. As for the free space, that'll depend on how you paritioned the drives in the first place.

 

[Xie]

You can always using something like Norton Ghost to create image files. Make the partitions on your new drive(s) then restore those images on to the newly created partitions. As for the free space, that'll depend on how you paritioned the drives in the first place.

well you can expand the partitions after you have them imaged over and use that free space.

 

[Ezergeezer]

I think programs like Ghost and Drive Image assume you are just backing up your system to replace it, back onto the same drive(s) as before, and they dont really make it clear as to what happens if you want to place back on a different size drive!

Thanks guys, I would go deeper, as in partition sizes, do they have to be exact to the byte or what....etc, others question too but...

The safe option I think, would be to start over and re-install everything new
after I sort the RAID first.

Thanks for the help.

 

[Howling Wolf]

About free space management, with Ghost, if you copy a 10Go partition to a 100Go partition on the target hard drive, then you'll find the same content on the target hdd... the source 10Go partition is merged with the 100Go one with around 90Go+ free.
When you change your hdd, usually it is for a larger one, that's why Ghost (and the likes, I guess...) handle things like that the right way... 😉

 

[toretto]

i recently used Norton ghost to image a 40 to a 120. i just told it to clone the drive and i never even partitioned it. it wrote the exact copy to the hard drive and just added the rest of the 120 to the end of it and made it free space. so i have all the free space left without a separate partition. worked great.

 

[Xie]

Good info toretto ... I didn't know you could do that w/ ghost.

 

[Howling Wolf]

Good info toretto ... I didn't know you could do that w/ ghost.

That's what I tried to explain, just above... same conclusion 😉

 

[Xie]

That's what I tried to explain, just above... same conclusion 😉

haha so you did 😛 Good work also Howling Wolf.