Partition Magic

[horstmann]

Will partition magic allow me to copy my old hard drive so that i can use the new hard drive in my computer to boot from without reinstalling everything?

I have my system drive as c: master right now. I want to move it to the slave drive. Once the partition is on the slave drive, do I have to physically change it to a master or can I just set the bios to boot off of the new drive?

Are there any other programs besides partition magic that will do this? I don't know if I want to drop $60 for it quite yet.


Thanks for any help.

 

[samir_nayanajaad]

Im not sure if partition magic will copy your hard drive like your wanting. I think you need to get Norton Ghost to do that. Ghost will take one hard drive and copy it exactly as is onto a new hard drive, called cloning, so no need to reinstall anything.

now as for your master slave situation I assume you are using IDE hard drives because with SATA hard drives there is no master or slave. Anyway you should be able to add another new drive as a slave and be able to boot from it just fine, you will just tweak your bios to do this. However, if I remember correctly although you can boot from a slave hard drive I think it is a slightest bit slower because the master gets first priority.

 

[horstmann]

I thought by the description on the symantec website that ghost is just for scheduled backups and things of that nature, but that is why I am asking for help.

Yes, the drives I have are IDE drives. My computer is old and I am trying to get another 6 months out of my computer before rebuilding.

 

[rdhood]

In the past month, I have upgraded drives in two systems. I did this:

System one:
120GB SATA -> 320GB SATA
once copied, 30GB PATA system -> 120GB SATA

System 2:
120GB PATA -> 200GB PATA
30GB PATA -> 120GB PATA


In each of these systems, I have Partition Magic 7.0. Yes, there are later versions. Yes, 7.0 is an old version. After having used PM from version 3.0 through 7.0, I never failed to move a system or other drive successfully. THIS time, however, PM successfully copied the non-system drives, but failed copying the system drives.

After doing a little searching, I downloaded and installed the demo (15 day) version of Acronis TrueImage 10. Acronis worked like a charm. Since I only need software like this about once every few years, the 15 day demo was fine.

So I dont know if a later version of PM would have worked, and I didn't care. Acronis worked and it was free.

 

[Guest]

Ghost will do exactly what you need.
Acronis True Image is really great to. It can take the image while you're running windows, pretty efficient.

 

[blue68f100]

Most HD mfg today come with a cd to allow you to copy your data to the new HD. So you should not need to buy any thing. You may need to change your boot drive in bios though. I've have used HG, PM and Digital Dolly to copy partition in the past, all work.

 

[horstmann]

Thanks guys, I think I'm going to try acronis true image this weekend. I did already try Western Digitals lifeguard tools that came with the drive, but I might have done something wrong. I just clicked copy drive, but it didn't copy the partition. Anyway, thanks again. If it doesnt work I'll ask some more questions.