Jeff said:
I'm totally new to this. I have a failing hard drive and would like to
restore the OS to the new drive. I plan on using Acronis to create the
image, but I'm unsure of what steps come next. I know I'll have to
format
the new drive. But I'm totally confused...can anyone recommend a good
site
or any suggestions....really any help would be greatly appreciated.
I'm familiar with Norton Ghost, a year or two older version. Perhaps you
can download the Acronis manual to see if it will do what you want.
I set up a bootable CD with the DOS version of Norton Ghost. Leaving the
old drive installed, I installed the new drive in the computer, but didn't
need to initialize it or format it. I then booted the CD and ran the DOS
Ghost.exe program. It allowed me to copy the old drive to the new drive,
adjusting partition sizes if desired.
I then removed the old drive, but when I booted up, I could not boot from
the new drive. I found that my Ghost would not copy the Vista master boot
record from the old drive. I found a free DOS utility MBRWiz, which could
copy the old drive's MBR to a file, and later copy it to the new drive's
MBR. This made the new drive bootable and the entire system worked just as
it had on the old drive.
I think tha the latest version of Norton Ghost and Acronis can do it in a
single step, but I don't know for sure. I do like doing it from DOS since
nothing has to be installed on the failing drive and possibly making things
worse.
-Paul Randall
