Norton Ghost from 120GB to 200GB hard Drive

HelterSkelter

My 120GB hard drive is almost full and I am considering investing in a 200GB! I currently have two 120GB hard drives and I backup the first by creating a ghost image of the first one and storing it on the second.

What I want to know is will the current ghost image of the 120GB drive restore ok onto a new 200GB hard drive? If not is there some other way of getting everything from current drive to the new one (the current drive is the boot drive with XP on it)?

Thanks.

snappieT

If you just constantly end up backing up, would you not consider using RAID? This writes to both hard drives at once. If one drive fails, you have a live replica on the other. You can pick up RAID controllers for PCI from €50, and this will allow you to add more drives to your PC, keeping the existing ones also.

beller b

Should work ok. Make sure Cd drive is first boot selection , boot from norton recovery disc & you should then get the option of where to recover from. (I'd keep the main drive safe untill every thing is set up ok)

SwampThing

When you Ghost, do a 'PARTITION to IMAGE' and when restoring to the bigger disk, do a 'DISK from IMAGE'.

HelterSkelter

snapscan1212p wrote:

If you just constantly end up backing up, would you not consider using RAID? This writes to both hard drives at once. If one drive fails, you have a live replica on the other. You can pick up RAID controllers for PCI from €50, and this will allow you to add more drives to your PC, keeping the existing ones also.

That's not a bad idea, I know very little about RAID though. Can you point me in the right direction?

SwampThing

You'll need two drives of the same size, and a RAID controller that 'does' RAID 1, which is mirroring. So, with 2 200GB drives, you have 200GB of disk space availabel to you and data is written to both at the same time. If one drive fails, you have a mirror image.
The down side, you've 400GB of disk space but can only use 200GB and ir's fractionally slower to read/write to disk.
Check you're mobo - it may already support RAID. Are you using SATA or IDE?

HelterSkelter

Thanks. I'm using IDE. I'll check out the motherboard but I doubt it supports RAID. It's about 3 years old.

SwampThing wrote:

You'll need two drives of the same size, and a RAID controller that 'does' RAID 1, which is mirroring. So, with 2 200GB drives, you have 200GB of disk space availabel to you and data is written to both at the same time. If one drive fails, you have a mirror image.
The down side, you've 400GB of disk space but can only use 200GB and ir's fractionally slower to read/write to disk.
Check you're mobo - it may already support RAID. Are you using SATA or IDE?

SwampThing

So, you'll need another 200GB IDE drive. It's generally best if they're the same make/model - less chance of a funny compatibility issue. Check out Komplett or Elara for IDE Raid controllers. As snapscan says, they're not expensive for entry-level cards.

Youll need to get the Ghost image onto your current 120GB drive (you'll need the two 200GB drives free for creating the raid set). So, maybe Ghost first onto a 200GB as discussed earlier, then Ghost back to the 120GB. Install the raid card, and Ghost back from 120GB to the new 200GB mirror set.

If you can get your hands on Acronis, it's a much better tool than Ghost. It's better at picking up secondary controller cards, imo.

snappieT

http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=32106&TabID=1&WorldID=&doy=9m5 is a decent card made by a very good manufacturer (Silicon Image)

HelterSkelter

That looks good.

Thanks for the help lads.