Sorry if this has been covered before (it kind of has but the answer didn't work for me). My system has an original 80GB hard drive partitioned into C: and D:. I just installed a new 160GB HD alongside the original. I was hoping to clone the entire contents (both partitions) onto the new drive, then make the new drive the boot drive, using Ghost 9.0.

I read the threads about having to copy partitions one at a time. The Help documentation says: "If the hard drive you are copying contains more than one partition (for example, a C:\ drive, a D:\drive, an E:\ drive, and so forth), you must copy each partition, one at a time, to the new hard drive." but it's not working for me.

I can copy C: (using "Copy Drive") no problem. However, when I copy D:, the destination drive letter selections are greyed out - I just wind up with a copy of D:

I guess I could achieve what I want with images, but the discussions here imply that Copy Drive should work and there's something I'm not quite getting.

Any help would be appreciated.

Beautiful! Thanks for the quick reply - this really wasn't obvious from the documentation!

The point that I was really missing was the one about copying to UNALLOCATED SPACE. When I first installed the new HD I ran the manufacturer's (Seagate's) installer, which put a partition on the disk. I guess that's why the drive letter choice was grayed-out when I tried to do the Ghost  Copy Drive - there wasn't any unallocated space.

Since the whole process worked out very nicely in the end, I feel I should summarize it here - might be useful to someone else:

My original configuration was a Maxtor 80GB partitioned (when I bought the system) as C: (primary) 16GB + D: (logical) 61GB.

That Maxtor drive was ~ 4 years old & making me increasingly nervous. The plan was to buy a new drive, move everything to the new drive, then use the old drive as backup (on the assumption that the old drive would fail first & in this new configuration I could simply replace it it without any rebuilding agony).

The new drive was a Seagate 160GB partitioned (by the Seagate installer) as H: (primary).

I used the Windows Disk Manager (Start -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management) to delete the H: partition - now I had  “Disk 0” with partitions C: and D:, and “Disk 1” with 149GB of Unallocated Space.

This is the situation I should have been in when I first tried working with Ghost. From here on everything went by the book:

(1) Did Ghost Copy Drive  - C: to Disk 1 Unallocated Space.
     (no drive letter, copy MBR)

(2) Did Ghost Copy Drive  - D: to Disk 1 Unallocated Space.
     (no drive letter, no MBR, Resize Drive to Fill Unallocated
      Space)

(3) Shut down computer, set the jumpers on the new Seagate drve to Master, disconnected the old Maxtor data & power connectors, re-booted.

(4) System came up wanting to do a CHKDSK on C: - ok.

(5) Everything looked good  -  at this point C: looked the same as before (16GB with ~ 1GB free), while D: was 133GB with 130GB free. Contents of both looked good.

(6) Shut down computer, set jumpers on old Maxtor to Slave, reconnected data & power cables, re-booted.

(7) System came up nicely - the configuration looked like this:

    C:  16GB  with 1 GB free          (on the new Seagate)
    D:  133GB with 130GB free       (on the new Seagate)
    H:  16GB  with 1 GB free          (on the old Maxtor)
    I:   60GB  with 57GB free         (on the old Maxtor)

I'll probably run it like this for a while (until I stop shaking!) then delete H: and I:, possibly combine them into 1 large partition, and use it for Ghost image backups.

Thanks for the timely help - I could have struggled with this for quite a while.

Correct me if i am wrong but the days of using ghost to "clone" like pre-ghost 9 are gone. Ghost is only good now to make a back up of the HD to a spare HD, in case of a crash. what happened to "cloning"? As in one would boot up with a dos disk run ghost.exe and create a .gho file. the only reason we when to 9 is trying to use bartsPE to "clone" a system with a usb nic driver being can't seem to get a usb nic to work in dos.

Chamb,

Your approach should work. Just follow the instructions in my initial post and “set drive active (for booting OS)” only for the C: drive copy. You only need to tick “Copy MBR” once. It doesn't matter which clone you choose as the MBR is not contained in either partition.

Let us know the outcome.


PS See "What's Wrong with the Microsoft Way?"

http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/principles.htm

Restore the C: drive first. You need to have the partitions in the same order as the original HD. The link I posted indicates that if you resize the partitions then the dual boot may fail. So keep the same C: drive size but you "may" be able to resize the D: drive.

Chamb,

It doesn't matter if you use Copy Drive from Windows or Image Restore from the Ghost CD Recovery Environment. Just personal preference. But in your case I'd use a blank HD (Unallocated Space) either way. To help avoid the Dual Boot problem.

My preference for your computer, I'd use Copy Drive. Copy C: drive and then copy D: drive and tick resize the  D: drive to fill unallocated space in Ghost. If the dual boot is broken I'd reinstall the new HD as a slave, delete both partitions from Disk Management, reboot and do the Copy Drive again but not resize the D: drive this time. The latter process should definitely work.

Keep us informed.

Chamb wrote on Dec 12^th, 2006 at 2:53pm:

That's what we wanted to hear. Great work.