Laptop HDD migration

[Tannin]

I've almost decided to upgrade my laptop drive again, this time from 80GB to 120GB. (Don't trust Seagate, so a Samsung 120GB is the biggest available.)

I'm wondering whether to just do a clean install on it (Windows 2000, obviously) or if I should transfer my existing, still pretty functional install over.

Outside of Ghost (which I own but hate) what are my options? Not interested in spending any money on software to do this - I still regret buying a Ghost ~18 months ago.)

 

[Mercutio]

Goddammit Tannin, if you'd just buy a decent copy of Ghost instead of the for-shit old one you've been using, you'd like it, love it and it would be one of your primary tools.

Anyway, I don't see a point in disrupting a functional Windows install because of a drive change. Motherboard upgrade, maybe, but not a drive change.

 

[mubs]

Many people have successfully done it by downloading a trial copy of Acronis True Image. I understand it works for 30 days.

WRT to your wish in the other thread for 300GB in a laptop, I recently bought a HDD adapter for the UltraBay 2000 in my Thinkpad T23. Also bought a 100GB Sammy. Put the Sammy in the laptop, the original 48GB IBM HDD in the UltraBay HDD adapter, used DriveImage (I've had it for ages) to clone, expanding partitions in the process. The 48GB will serve as additional, hot-swappable storage. You do lose more battery juice, of course, but it's nice to have the additional space.

Acronis is supposed to work with USB/FireWire drives as well. I have a couple of versions of Ghost, which I never use. IMHO, DriveImage is a lot easier and cleaner to use, and makes much smaller images. Only downside is that it doesn;t support USB/FW devices. As usual Symantec bought 'em and killed the product.

 

[LunarMist]

I have upgraded the hard drive in my notebook five times already and number six will occur when I get a 160GB drive. Easiest for me is to use the last good version of Drive Image (DI 2002, aka DI 6) to create an image of the c: partition onto the d: partition. Then I burn a DVD and boot from that to restore the image to the new drive. True Image also works well. In that case one can create an image in Windows and make the bootable DVD. For systems without DVDs, TI can be used to clone the image to the new drive in an external USB enclosure. Some users report that this does not always work, but it worked when I tried it.

 

[Buck]

That's something I need to setup in my garage -- 2.5 drive copy hardware. I have the software, I just need the hardware setup.

 

[LunarMist]

(Don't trust Seagate, so a Samsung 120GB is the biggest available.)

Is it the Spinpoint M HM120JC? The Samsung 120GB is becoming very cheap here, but I wonder if it is any good compared to the similar Monumentus.

 

[Santilli]

I researched this a bunch, and came to the conclusion the new generation drives are much better then the old, but, that even the 4200rpm new drives are decent, and cheaper. 5400 are nice, but not enough faster then the 4200rpm in my Panasonic to make me want to change. For the older generation, 10 mb/sec drives, you have the ATA 5 vs. ATA 6 problem, which means no 7200 rpm drives, and, I'm not sure what happens when you hook an ATA 6 to an old laptop, or if the cable is different, and you can't.

The 7200's did not have enough speed to make me want to jump at one, for the bucks, and, the 5400's are all speedwise, close enough so it doesn't matter which you pick.

That was 3 months or so ago, when I was looking at them...

Hope this helps.

Tannin, why do you need 120 gig laptop drive? DVD's?

I'm with Tannin, in that I've never had a copy of Ghost that worked, but, it was bundled with a couple really old software packages, and became obselete everytime Windows changes a service pack.

Reminds me of the old Apple Software supporters that required dollar upgrades everytime Apple changed the OS, which was every 4 months...

End rant...

S

 

[Buck]

I finally got the hardware. Now I can hook laptop drives onto my copy workstation.

 

[LunarMist]

Greg,

I'm not sure what you mean by research, but I have just about given up on other people's benchmarks and reviews. IMO it is best to buy the drives and test them in your own system. Most notebooks made in the last five years accept ATA-6 drives. Some small notebooks use 3.3V drives and of course most of the new subnotes use the crappy 1.8" 4200 rpm drives.

I believe that Tony needs the 120GB for storing RAW files captured over many weeks of driving around Australia in his SUV.

 

[Santilli]

LM:

The difference between the drives, in all the tests I looked at wasn't enough to get me to fork over the money.

But, my CF-51 came with a ATA 6 4200 rpm drive, and sustained data transfer is not the double that I look for, before buying a new drive.

Tony can certainly afford to play with this. I just find the bleeding edge is too expensive to justify the preformance numbers....

s

 

[CougTek]

I did a lot of 2.5" drive backups and copies in the last two weeks. Acronis is great for backups since it can make an image of your drive and send it to a remote backup drive via network (Acronis can use your network card). But for a drive to drive copy, I still prefer Ghost. The other tech. at my workplace seem to prefer Acronis, but I'm more familiar with Ghost and I tend to stick with tools that work and that are simple to use. Acronis has a lot of options, most you won't need for a simple drive copy.

 

[Bozo]

Mubs:
My version of Drive Image (5.5) works fine with a USB hard drive. Don't know about Firewire.

Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[LunarMist]

I have DI 2, 4, 5, 6 and the useless 7 that later became a version of Ghost. I did not know there was a 5.5. DI 6 (2002) does not see my Firewire drives; that is why I got True Image 6 and later TI 8. However, on my desktop system neither sees the firewire drives, but both do on my notebook. Of course FW is not bootable on a PC anyway.

 

[mubs]

I guess I didn't clarify; I never tried using DI within Windows to work with external drives; never had a need. I did so badly want to write to external USB or FW external drives by booting the dos/floppy version of DI. I spent an enormous amount of time trying with the USB/FW DOS drivers that come with Ghost, and with other drivers I found searching the web. The problem is once these drivers are loaded, there's not enough room for DI. Tried all the stunts with memory management. I think DI itself would have to be recompiled to allow a major portion of it to load in extended memory to allow these drivers to co-exist. I've never done that kind of programming; the business application programming I did earlier in my career was decades ago. I've been getting around this limitation by writing the image to the same drive then booting into Windows and copying it to an external drive or burning a DVD, but this method is not always practical/feasible.

So like LM, I'll probably end up buying a copy of Acronis TI just for the support for external drives.

 

[Bozo]

It must be a BIOS thing.
I use the Drive Image floppys without modification to write to a WD800U017 USB hard drive.
I have the USB ports setup as bootable in BIOS, if that makes a difference.
This is on Intel motherboards.

Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[Tannin]

I used to use Drive Image too, starting back in the days when it was an OS/2 product, which is quite a few years ago now. Stayed with it through several versions. Was sad when Slimeantics gobbled it up.

Merc, I hear you. But it's very difficult for me to beleve - really believe - that a product with a Slimentic badge could be good enough to deserve my dollar. I just plain hate the company and every product they have ever touched since Q&A was state of the art in CP/M and DOS 3.x days.

So I believe you, cause I've learned to trust you implicitly on any subject that doesn't have to do wioth video cards. And equally, I believe with all my heart that Slimetek stuff is evil. One of those irresistable force vs immovable object confrontations, leading to considerable amounts of unpleasant cognitive dissonance every time I think about it, with the result that I deal with it as I deal with so many awkward things: do nothing and make more tea.

Back to my original query: I decided that my 12 to 8 month old W2K install was getting a bit tired anyway. For some reason it had stopped being able to see the optical drives, and there were a couple of other minor issues that I didn't feel like spending more than a short while trying to troubleshoot, so I just did a fresh install after all. It was a good decision: I'm just about finished tweaking the new install now and it's running very well.

Thanks for all the useful suggestions, I can come back and revisit this thread if/when a similar issue crops up.

 

[Sol]

I agree with Tony on this one, the highest point in the lifecycle of any Symantec product is right before Symantec bought it. All my experience with Symantec products, ghost included, suggests that Symantec products only ever get worse, never better... Does anyone know of a producct that Symantec didn't just buy of someone else? Something the actually made themselves? It would be kind of interesting to see how that would go... Horrifying no doubt, but interesting none the less...

 

[Tannin]

Yes: Q&A, which was actually pretty good. Mind you, we are talking CP/M and DOS 3.X days here.

 

[Mercutio]

Ghost 9 is a truly great program. It doesn't do anything particularly stupid or behave in any really unexpected ways. It images drives, just like its distant DOS ancestor. Symantec added much-appreciated CD and DVD burning, USB and Firewire support and wrapped in boot manager and a GUI for building the command line that the program will use.

TrueImage might be a better deal for the future - I don't like DriveImage at all, and that's what the current version of Ghost is - but when I shake my magic 8-ball, I see Acronis being bought out by Symantec sometime in the not too distant future anyway.