Upgrade Hard Drive - transfer data & partitions

Running Windows 7 64 bit, what is the best utility to transfer all my
crap from the old drive to the new one?
Not just the data, I want to transfer the whole thing without going
through a reinstall. I've done this before but I can't remember the
name of the utility.
I have an adapter to hook up a SATA drive as USB - I use it for getting
data off corrupted drives.

In article , Justin wrote:
Running Windows 7 64 bit, what is the best utility to transfer all my
crap from the old drive to the new one?
Not just the data, I want to transfer the whole thing without going
through a reinstall. I've done this before but I can't remember the
name of the utility.
I have an adapter to hook up a SATA drive as USB - I use it for getting
data off corrupted drives.

What is the manufacturer and model of the new drive????

"Justin" wrote in message ...
Running Windows 7 64 bit, what is the best utility to transfer all my
crap from the old drive to the new one?
Not just the data, I want to transfer the whole thing without going
through a reinstall. I've done this before but I can't remember the
name of the utility.
I have an adapter to hook up a SATA drive as USB - I use it for getting
data off corrupted drives.

Most hard drive manufacturers have a downloadable utility which lets
you clone your old HD to the new HD that is made by the manufacturer.
Other than that, for cloning just individual partitions and for making
image files and incremental cloning of partitions and entire HDs, there
are Norton Ghost, Acronis True Image, Casper, GPartEd and PartitionMagic
(both of the latter being free and runable under Linux and as self-loading
..iso files). Whether they will work with Windows 8 is still generally unknown.

*TimDaniels*

On Nov 12, 10:16 am, Justin wrote:
Running Windows 7 64 bit, what is the best utility to transfer all my
crap from the old drive to the new one?
Not just the data, I want to transfer the whole thing without going
through a reinstall. I've done this before but I can't remember the
name of the utility.
I have an adapter to hook up a SATA drive as USB - I use it for getting
data off corrupted drives.

You'll need to boot off a disc, HD or optical, with USB support for
recognizing the attached drive. I generally stick the drive in a MB
port for the binary transfer, besides having optical boot discs
written and ready, the USB drivers or transfer rates can be slower
than the time to open it up and just do the crap.

Timothy Daniels wrote:

"Justin" wrote in message
...
Running Windows 7 64 bit, what is the best utility to transfer all my
crap from the old drive to the new one?
Not just the data, I want to transfer the whole thing without going
through a reinstall. I've done this before but I can't remember the
name of the utility.
I have an adapter to hook up a SATA drive as USB - I use it for
getting data off corrupted drives.

Most hard drive manufacturers have a downloadable utility which lets
you clone your old HD to the new HD that is made by the manufacturer.
Other than that, for cloning just individual partitions and for making
image files and incremental cloning of partitions and entire HDs, there
are Norton Ghost, Acronis True Image, Casper, GPartEd and PartitionMagic
(both of the latter being free and runable under Linux and as self-loading
.iso files). Whether they will work with Windows 8 is still generally
unknown.

*TimDaniels*

In some cases, the free utility from the disk manufacturer, is actually
written by Acronis. It may include a PDF manual you can download from
the same web page. The Acronis branding, shows inside the PDF manual.

*******

Macrium Reflect Free, can likely copy disks. That might be
another way, and because it uses VSS (volume shadow service),
can do that while the OS is running. In the same way, that the
"System Image" capability in Windows 7, can in two steps, copy
the contents of one disk to another. (Backup on the source disk,
restore using the recovery CD or install DVD, on the destination disk.)

Older versions of Ghost, didn't use VSS, and then the software
has to reboot into the special Ghost software, to make the
copy. Many modern utilities use the VSS service offered by the
OS, and for that, the OS can remain running while C: gets copied.

There are probably more freebie clone packages, ones I've not
bothered to use or evaluate.

*******

If I was doing it, being lazy, I might just boot a Linux LiveCD,
and with both disks plugged in, do something like this

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

and just walk away from the machine. That assumes the source
disk is lettered "sda" and the destination is "sdb". That
requires some background knowledge to get it right. (For
example, using sudo fdisk /dev/sda and the "print" function,
to verify that sda really is the source disk. And repeating
the exercise for /dev/sdb to verify that all it has is the
single NTFS partition from the disk drive manufacturer factory.)

To do that style of "dumb" sector by sector transfer, the
destination disk should be the same size or bigger than the
source. A dumb sector copy, cannot massage partitions to fit
a smaller disk. The main benefit of a sector-by-sector copy,
is it doesn't matter what kind of partitions on there. Say,
for example, you had a copy of FreeBSD on the same disk as
Windows 7, and weren't sure how to copy it. Then the
sector by sector method, is your friend. More intelligent
transfer methods are reserved for the "popular" partition
types, like FAT32, NTFS, EXT2/3/4.

While Linux has GParted for partition management functions,
I don't know if I'd trust it to make an "exact" copy.
GParted may seem to have your best interests in
mind, but examining the details of what it's been doing,
is usually scary (leaves you scratching your head,
like finding it did a "resize" command perhaps, when
all you asked it to do is change the "label" on a partition).

*******

The Acronis on the disk manufacturer site, should be enough
for this job. Since the source disk is Windows 7, it'll likely
run OK.

If a person was bored, they could always go through this list.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...oning_software

Paul

On 11/12/2012 12:56 PM, GMAN wrote:
In , wrote:
Running Windows 7 64 bit, what is the best utility to transfer all my
crap from the old drive to the new one?
Not just the data, I want to transfer the whole thing without going
through a reinstall. I've done this before but I can't remember the
name of the utility.
I have an adapter to hook up a SATA drive as USB - I use it for getting
data off corrupted drives.

What is the manufacturer and model of the new drive????





Western Digital. I forget the exact model...

Justin wrote:
On 11/12/2012 12:56 PM, GMAN wrote:
In ,
wrote:
Running Windows 7 64 bit, what is the best utility to transfer all my
crap from the old drive to the new one?
Not just the data, I want to transfer the whole thing without going
through a reinstall. I've done this before but I can't remember the
name of the utility.
I have an adapter to hook up a SATA drive as USB - I use it for getting
data off corrupted drives.

What is the manufacturer and model of the new drive????





Western Digital. I forget the exact model...

Check the downloads on their site.

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?wdc_lang=en

Paul

Paul nospam needed.com wrote:

Macrium Reflect Free, can likely copy disks. That might be
another way, and because it uses VSS (volume shadow service),
can do that while the OS is running.

Yup. And apparently they did something in the most recent version
5 that speeds up the process of restoring from rescue CD. Easy as
cake.

On Mon, 12 Nov 2012 10:16:10 -0500, Justin
wrote:

Running Windows 7 64 bit, what is the best utility to transfer all my
crap from the old drive to the new one?
Not just the data, I want to transfer the whole thing without going
through a reinstall. I've done this before but I can't remember the
name of the utility.
I have an adapter to hook up a SATA drive as USB - I use it for getting
data off corrupted drives.

The last time I did it I used a freeware ugly Unix-based utility. It
worked but it was utterly unfriendly by normal Windows standards (for
example, it didn't have the sense to suggest or even identify the
drive that had no partition on it as a target and then it pestered me
with overwrite warnings on that very same empty drive. Had the target
drive not been obviously unique this could have been a problem.)

On Mon, 12 Nov 2012 10:16:10 -0500, Justin
wrote:

Running Windows 7 64 bit, what is the best utility to transfer all my
crap from the old drive to the new one?

"Loren Pechtel" wrote in message
...

The last time I did it I used a freeware ugly Unix-based utility. It
worked but it was utterly unfriendly by normal Windows standards

This is why drive manufacturers now distribute their own
software for the purpose. Western Digital's worked flawlessly
for my purposes (three times.)

--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)