Other Norton Products

[bshaw2]

HI,

I've been reading the various posts and thought I had it all figured out how to do this but now am mightily confused. What I want to do is"clone" my (wife's ) ASUS EEE PC Hard Disk, all partitions, including the Restore partition and the BIOS Booster partitions. Drive image pic attached. I have deleted the D: Partition as it was empty, so I have C: and the other two. (I have read the pros and cons of these partitions and understand the sentiment but prefer to keep them all the same). MY current disk is 250 gig, the SSD 120Gig.

I gather the preferred way to do this is image-restore which means (if I understood) I need 4 drives connected: The original harddrive, the Norton Ghost CD in the CD Drive, the SSD replacement drive, AND another drive to store the image on. OK, I guess I don't really need the original and SSD drives connected simultaneously, but I need 4 drives total to do the operation. Please correct me if wrong. I then image the existing drive including the two hidden partitions to the "other" (USB) drive and restore that image to the SSD drive. Is this right? Also, Ghost 15 can't do this in "disk clone" mode since, as discussed, "disk" and "partition" are used interchangeably in Ghost these days.

On the restore step, I get a little fuzzy. I think the partitions must be in the same order and the hidden ones the same size? Any other things I am missing? Do I need to shrink C: before imaging since it is sligtly larger than the new drive when combined with the hidden partitions, although it is now only 40% used.

Thanks all - apologize if this use case has been covered, but I couldn't find it. I do want to keep both hidden partitions and the function provided since I find it useful.

Best,
Byron

[bshaw2]

Not sure hot to attach screen shot of disk management

[bshaw2]

[DaveH]

You need a way to boot the Ghost recovery disk.  Either and external USB CD-Rom, or a bootable flash drive.

Then you need an external drive to hold the image files.

After you image the existing partitions to the external drive, you will replace the old drive with the SSD and then restore the images onto the new drive in the correct order.

Yes, it's best that you shrink the C drive partition first.

Can you post a screen shot of disk management please.   I have a couple EEE's but I always reformat them and reinstall a clean version of windows.

Dave

[DaveH]

Sorry, I didn't see the post with the screenshot when I made mine.

Your new 120GB drive will only actually be 111.79GB in windows.

So that may leave you 3.25GB short of space.  Regardless of how much space is used on the C drive, ghost does a sector by sector copy and if your partition happens to have unmovable files at the very end of the partition it's not going to fit.

Try right clicking on the partition in disk management and select "shrink".   see if you can go ahread and shrink it by 3.25GB

Since there are 1024MB in 1GB, that would be 3,328.00 MB's

Do you also have a way of booting the Ghost recovery disk?

A USB CD-Rom of bootable flash drive?

Dave

[bshaw2]

Thanks. I will shrink C: first. I was going to boot off the Ghost CD using a USB CD Drive - should be ok?

Are there any settings I need to pay attention to to get the recovery and BIOS Booster partitions to actually work once restored? Size must be the same or will Ghost do that automatically? I think BIOS Booster partition must be at end of drive?

Regards,
Byron

[Brian_K]

Byron,

I know you have been through the pros and cons of the 4 partitions. Disk space is at a premium on a 120 GB SSD and having a 15 GB restore partition which you will never use (now that you have Ghost) seems like a waste of 15 GB. You can always keep an image of the partition on another HD if you are sentimental.

I doubt Ghost will see your EFI partition. It didn't in another thread but that was for Copy Drive rather than creating an image. Personally, I'd just image the Win7 partition.

I had a 160 GB HD in my ASUS netbook and upgraded to a 320 GB HD. I didn't image the Recovery or the EFI partitions. Deliberately. But I didn't like Ready Boost or whatever it's called. It made it difficult to boot from USB flash drives and only saved 5 seconds of boot time.

[DaveH]

Actually I agree about not wasting the space for the recovery partition, but thats your choice.

On my first EEE, I imaged the recovery partition and then used Ghost image explorer to pull the image files out of it.

It actually had images made from the DOS version of Ghost and it had a ghost32.exe file that is used to restore the images.

I saved those files elsewhere and then got rid of that partition.

By default when you restore an EEE it restores Both the C and D drive automatically.  A lot of people who were using the D drive for data were in for quite a shock when they booted back into windows and found all the data gone.  I'm not sure if they ever fixed that but by running the ghost32.exe manually your able to choose what partition to restore instead of both.

I just booted my EEE to the recovery disk, Ghost can see the bootbooster partition and I can image it.   But I don't have Ghost installed to be able to try it in windows.

I'm not sure if it needs to be tha last partition, but thats where I made mine just because thats where it was before.

I know it doesn't have to be in any certain order as long as it is a primary.  I have 5 partitions total with it being last and it works fine although I never use it for the same reason Brian gave.

I think it needs to be at least 8 or 12MB.  Mine ended up at 32MB because thats what I happened to have at the end of the drive.   I can't remember if I made it with, I remember I had a heck of a time trying to find something to change the partition type.  I made a primary partition and formatted it as FAT (not sure if it really needs to be formatted).  Then I removed the drive letter and changed the partition type from FAT to EFI.  I can't remember if I used PTedit or Gparted. 

But after I renabled it in the BIOS it started working on the second or third reboot.

Then I turned it off because I had a heck of a time trying to enter the BIOS or boot to a flash drive.

Dave