Ghost in the Machine
The topic here is Norton Ghost, which helped me do something that I’ve been dreading for a long time. The only downside is that although Norton Ghost had all of the capabilities I eventually needed, I didn’t really know how to use it (I refused to go through any tutorials) and I made a few mistakes along the way.
I bought a pair of 300GB 7200 Maxtor DiamondMax SATA drives a few months ago. I have a somewhat cheap Dell Dimension 4600 whose case only supports two internal 3.5” hard drives. The 5.25 drive bays are both full. I immediately replaced my secondary 20GB drive with one of the DiamondMax drives. This was easy and I lived like this for about a month.
The Problem
I wanted to replace my main system drive but I didn't want to re-install Windows.
This is an atypical task for me. I'm usually the first one to blow away Windows and start over when faced with a problem like this. This time around, I must admit that my Windows XP Pro installation is holding up just fine despite the fact that it's been running for almost a year. I do have an enormous investment in it's setup and configuration so I though to myself, "It's worth a try".
The Process
The process involved Norton Ghost 2003. It's a version behind but not a dollar short. In the end, the transfer took me 6 hours. Now that I know what I'm doing, I could reproduce it in about 2 hours. I could step
Ghost works by copying from a real drive to another drive, or from a real drive to an image, or an image to a real drive, etc. It does this after a reboot into PC DOS, which works fine despite the shock of going back into DOS like that.
The version of PC DOS used has the necessary drivers to read all of my SATA and USB 2.0 drives. Cool.
To start, I selected my primary drive as the source. It's a 40GB IDE connected to my primary IDE controller.. I also have a D: drive connected to my secondary SATA port. I did this by accident, but it worked out well that I did. When I replaced the IDE drive with the second SATA drive, it connected to my primary SATA port and booted from that primary drive.
I formatted the new drive as NTFS and assigned a drive letter of E:. This turned out to be my biggest mistake and I made it early on. Even though Ghost blows away your drive, the letter assignment sticks.
I created an image file of the IDE drive on D:. I rebooted into the image, only to see SYSTEMROOT set to E:. However, tons of registry entries still point to C: and that drive was not found.
I connected the IDE back. So C: was available. I booted into the SATA (E:) and the boot worked, but god knows what was going on under the hood. SYSTEMROOT was E:, but plenty of stuff on the IDE drive (C:) was getting accessed.
Many boots and images later, I determined that I should delete all of the partitions on the SATA (E:) and leave it's drive letter unassigned.
This did the trick. I rebooted onto the SATA drive with my current install of Windows XP and life was at last good. This last leg was actually accomplished on Christmas Eve morning, as the last image was kicked off before I went to bed.
Now I had plenty of space on C: and I had all of my programs and settings preserved. Norton Ghost did the trick.
Conclusion
Like anything, this whole thing taught me a bunch of things. Unfortnately, I should have known all of this by now. It's nice to know that I can take an image pretty easily now with Ghost as a backup. Unfortunately, now that I have a 300GB drive, the backup will likely be huge. I'll probably stick to STOMP Backup My PC for my backups, allowing me to select directories.
Notes
Oddly, the drive change was enough for Photoshop to take notice. It asked me to activate my copy of Photoshop CS once again. This went off without a hitch, so that's good.