Need to ghost two laptop drives,advice please!

allybhoy

Mods please feel free to move if this is the incorrect forum.
Ok ill try and make a long and relatively complicated story short, I need to clone two laptop IDE harddrives either to an image or to an identical disk (which im trying to source). One is Linux one is XP, both 80GBs. I tried to clone the XP drive first, handy enough me thought! The drives are physically out of the laptops and using the original laptops is out of the question, so I have to use a usb caddy to clone them, which I have. The problem is I only have one caddy, so what I tried to do the other day, was installed Norton Ghost (10 i think) on my own laptop and hooked up the caddy and an external USB 500Gb drive, and tried to create an image of the XP drive in the caddy and drop it onto the 500GB drive. The wizard ran through fine but when it asked me to reboot etc, the system rebooted, the ghost splash screen came up, and hung for about 60seconds and then my laptop rebooted again. Once I logged on it said that the norton ghost task had failed and didnt give me a specific error. I tried again but the same thing happend. Then I went into advanced settings and set the USB drivers to 1.1 (failed) and 2.0 and this also failed. Anyone any suggestions as to what I can do? I know its going to be something simple like enabling legacy drivers but ive had a quick search and couldnt find anything.

I havnt tried cloning the linux disk yet as I am waiting to get my hands on Acronis Disk Director.

MunsterCycling

Haven't used Ghost much at all but I figure its because you are using two different size HDDs that is causing the failure, try when you get another caddy to ghost them.

Out of curiosity, you know the drive you Ghost onto will get wiped yeah? JUst wondering if you knew...


MC

allybhoy

Sorry i meant to say that what i did was created a ghost image backup file and tried to save it onto the external harddrive which you can do with norton ghost. It creates a .gho file then using ghost you can restore this image file to any drive you want.

And yes i know that any drive i want to drop the image onto will get wiped.

Think I may have it sussed, in advanced settings there is an option to "assign drive letters to removable storage" and for some reason its unchecked by default. Im not sure why its unchecked but ill try and create an image later and update the thread. After that ill try the linux disk which should be fun

MunsterCycling

Cool, let us know how you get on.



MC

kaizersoze

Acronis is much better and straight forward than Ghost for what you want.

Fysh

The guys at Runtime.org have a tool called DriveImageXML, and they've made a plugin version for WinPE that works quite well - I've succesfully cloned laptop hard drives several times using a USB-to-IDE adapter and booting to a BartPE disk. (Have a look at bootcd.us if you need more info on making BartPE disks).