Ghost image and new hard drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter Shawn E. Hale
  • Start date Start date
S

Shawn E. Hale

Recently I had a hard drive start developing bad sectors. I used Symantec
Ghost to create an image of the drive onto an external USB drive. My
computer is now at Gateway getting a new hard drive installed. The OS is XP
Pro. Am I going to have a problem restoring the "Ghosted" image to the new
hard drive due to it being a significant hardware change? If so, how do I
work around it? I am getting nervous that I will have a back up of all my
information and be unable to use it. Thanks.
 
Thanks for the quick reply but I believe Gateway is going to keep the old
drive. Ideally, I would like to hook up the USB, restore everything, boot
up and go but I am reading some people are having problems with XP security
functions on the re-boot after cloning. The computer will be the same with
all the same hardware - except for the new drive.
 
I have not heard of anything like this. it should just
work fine. the other thing i can think of would be to
install ghost on the new hard drive and use ghost
explorer to open the image you created and pull off any
files that you need.

Can you just try putting th eghost image onto the new
hard drive?? it may work and if it doesn't, you still
have all your information in the image.

Hope this helps
Scott
 
If the only thing that is changing is the hard drive then you should have
no problems. XP does not consider a hard drive change as a significant
hardware change for XP activation. The activation is mainly based on
motherboard components.

The only problem I see is that Ghost may only restore the original size of
the old hard drive. You will then need Partition Magic in order to expand
the partition.

Y.
 
There is a happy ending to this story. Ghost does not have the capability
to skip bad sectors on an NTFS file system and will stop restoring when it
encounters a bad sector. (The command line switch to do this is for FAT
file systems only). So I had the hard drive replaced with one that was the
same size as the imaged (bad) one. "Ghosted" the image back onto the new
hard drive and XP Pro rebooted with no problems or activation issues.
 
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