Re: Changing boot hard drive

On Thu, 31 May 2007 10:53:31 GMT, "Jan Alter" <bearpuf@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

I have to mention that this thread has been enjoyable to read for the
quality of answers all the folks who have been responding. From my own
experience the information has been excellent and delivered without the
one-upsmanship that so often promulgates newsgroups in longer threads.
One thing that folks keep mentioning to the OP is that he should back up
his files before starting any of the cloning process, so I'll chime in here.
If one values the data and can't afford to lose it then copy it to
external media, whether it be a USB external drive or CDs. That is normal
everyday backup procedure anyway. But to put it another way: imagine driving
a car from the east coast to California and having a flat tire in Nevada (in
the desert at midnight), and then discovers there is no spare tire.

--
Jan Alter
bearpuf@xxxxxxxxxxx
or
jalter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


I have been appreciative of the help on here. This newsgroup seems to
be much more helpful than most. I guess we're all on the same level
as far as building our own systems and not relying on commercial
computers that come with the latest OS installed and have lots of
drive space. I have always built my own computers, and I have always
been behind the rest of the world as far as computer power and the OS
I use. However, in the early 1990s I had gotten my hands on some
medical industry throw-aways and had one of the first 486 computers
with one gig of hard drive space and a large amount of ram. All of
that to run Windows 3.1. These days one gig is nothing, and (thank
God) the drives are not the size of a large brick (like those old
ones), and there seems to be no limit to the amount of ram.

I still have not found the software to make this transfer. I
downloaded Casper (demo). Found it would not run on Win98, requires
win2K or higher. I looked at Norton Ghost. They have a demo, but it
needs some other software and I left their site at that point. I
downloaded another demo that refuses to install without giving them
personal info, and I found that faking it dont work. I most recently
downloaded the Western Digital Data Lifeguard. It loaded but did
nothing at all. I dont presently have any WD drives. Then it caused
windows to lock up. I deleted it after that. I'll try the other hard
drive companies next.

What gets me, is that MS puts so much useless crap in Windows, yet
they never put anything in it for cloning a drive. Quite irritating
to say the least....

As far as a backup, I did that first. Every one of my partitions have
a copy on another spare hard drive. I did that before I did anything
else. I already used Partition Magic to change partitions around in
order to give my C: partition the max amount of space.

On that note, Partition Magic contains a thing to "copy a partition".
I used this to copy C: to another drive. I unplugged my C: drive,
replaced it with the copied drive and got an error message to insert
boot floppy in A:. So much for that !!!

Thanks everyone.

George
.

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