Hack 95 Clone Your Hard Disk

Getting a shiny new PC is a wonderful experience, but a new computer won't have the lived-in feel of your familiar old PC. If your old PC is just the way you want it but not fast enough, won't accept as much RAM as you need, can't take a better video adapter, or doesn't have a big enough hard drive space, then cloning it onto a new hard drive is easy.

Most of your PC's "personality" is on the hard drive—all of the desktop settings, browser preferences and history, and, of course, datafiles. You can transfer and retain that personality on a new PC or simply on a new hard drive with disk imaging software like Symantec's GHOST or Drive Image (http://www.symantec.com) or Acronis's True Image, (http://www.acronis.com).

Have your device driver installation disks handy if you are cloning to a new PC that's different from your previous one. The biggest trouble comes when the new PC has a totally different motherboard. (Windows will usually forgive other hardware changes.) If you're staying with the same chipset manufacturer (Intel, Via, etc.) but only leaping a chipset generation or two, it should go smoothly. A big jump, such as from a Pentium II system to an AMD64 system, is probably not going to work. Even a seemingly small jump, such as from a Pentium 3 to a Pentium 4, could be troublesome. Your mileage may vary.

This process is acceptable but not "perfect" when used with Windows XP and marginally acceptable with Windows 2000. This technique is not recommended for use with Windows 9x-Me because their installations lack the device drivers and robust "new hardware found" forgiveness of 2000 and XP to accommodate the new system hardware. Linux is generally much more forgiving than Windows, but I suggest you switch to a generic kernel (one compiled for Intel 386 architecture) before the upgrade and then install a kernel compiled for your processor architecture after you've confirmed that the upgrade is working well. If you're just upgrading your hard drive, this should work with any operating system.

GHOST is a DOS-based program, installed first on your hard drive and run from a DOS prompt, or it can be transferred to diskette as needed. If you run GHOST from within Windows, it will create a temporary DOS partition [Hack #40] somewhere in the unused space on your hard drive and reboot into PC-DOS to do its thing. For this reason, GHOST for Windows requires that you have one free partition slot left. (For example, if you've set up three primary partitions and one logical, GHOST will refuse to run.)

If something goes awry with GHOST during this time, you could end up with strange little DOS partitions whose cylinders overlap with an existing partition. I have found that you can safely delete this partition by booting into a Linux rescue CD [Hack #50] and using Linux FDISK. But this is dangerous territory, and if you find yourself here, it may be best to contact Symantec support.

Because this is such a horrible kludge, I do not suggest that you run GHOST from within Windows.

Drive Image, shown in Figure 10-1, and True Image, shown in Figure 10-2, work from within Windows. Each of these programs allows you to transfer partitions or entire drives from one to the other or create an image file of a hard drive that you can read with a special explore program to retrieve individual files from within the image file.

Figure 10-1. Drive Image performs imaging and disk copying within Windows

Figure 10-2. True Image drive-cloning selections

Drive cloning is best done with both drives connected to the same PC but can be done over special parallel port cables or even a local network. Transferring the contents of an entire disk drive to another, including the boot files, operating system, directory structure, and files is the purest and simplest "one-shot" process to get your existing PC personality up and running on a new drive or PC.

Symantec's GHOST and Drive Image and Acronis's True Image aren't the only utilities available for copying the contents of one hard drive to another. A small handful of other products are readily available as well, two of them specific to Linux systems:

For Linux

ghost4unix at http://rfhs8012.fh-regensburg.de/~feyrer/g4u/

QTparted at http://qtparted.sourceforge.net/

ForWindows

HDClone at http://www.miray.de/download/sat.hdclone.html

Farstone's DriveClone at http://www.farstone.com

You may have to reactivate Windows XP or 2003 with Microsoft if you transfer it to a new hard drive, especially into a new PC system or after a motherboard swap. Windows detects significant hardware changes and determines that enough system components have changed that the installation may be an attempt to pirate a copy of the operating system. Have no fear; if you are not trying to pirate the OS, reactivation by phone is a very simple process.