Other Norton Products

[alja1]

I have a Toshiba Satellite L355 laptop running Vista Home Premium, 3gb ram, and a 160gb HD.  I just bought a 640gb Seagate drive and I'd like to image the old drive to the new one.  I'm using Ghost 15 and have done a live update.

I think that it is important to mention that the existing HD has two allocations: One that has no Volume name, is only 1.46gb, no file system, and says "Healthy (EISA Configuration)"...I guess this is the Toshiba recovery partition.  The other is the C: drive.

The post that I found the most helpful was this one even though it refers to Ghost 14: http://community.norton.com/t5/Other-Norton-Products/System-migration-to-new-hdd-using-Ghost-14/m-p/...

Here's how far I get before I get an error:

I attached the new drive to my laptop with a USB 2.0 to SATA adaptor 

Using Admin Tools / Disc management from control panel I initialized the new disk - leaving it unallocated

Opened Ghost and selected Copy My Disc from the tools

Checked the show hidden drives box and selected the recovery partition to copy

Setting options Check for errors (both), copy MBR, DO NOT CHECK RESIZE.

When I do this, here is the error that I get:

-Error EC8F17B3: Cannot complete copying of TOSHIBA SYSTEM VOLUME (*:\) drive.
--Cannot copy source drive to destination location.
---Allocated cluster list too long.
---Cannot copy source drive to destination location.
----Allocated cluster list too long.

Please help...this seems like it should be easy.   Allen

[Brian_K]

alja1,

Just a couple of questions before I make some suggestions about how to beat this error.

The 1.46 GB partition is too small for a recovery partition. Could you look in Disk Management and tell us how much Free Space is present in that partition. In the Status column, what does it say about the partition? Does it say System, Active?

How much Free Space is present in your Vista partition?

With your 640 GB HD, how large would you like the Vista partition? Would you like a Data partition on this HD?

[DaveH]

This shows the Toshiba EISA partition.

http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/tais/support/jsp/bulletin.jsp?ct=SB&soid=2222431&ref=EV

Look how the pictures show it empty.

Dave

[alja1]

Brian and Dave, thank you both so much for helping.  Here is link to a screen print of my Disk Management: http://www.longtermcareguy.com/allentest/Disk%20Management%20Screen%20Print.png

Free space in the 1.46 GB partition is 100%, 1.46 GB

It does not say active

23.33 GB, or 13% is available on the Vista partition

As to your questions "With your 640 GB HD, how large would you like the Vista partition? Would you like a Data partition on this HD?"  I will take your suggestion on Vista partition but would like to err on the side of having too much space for Vista rather than having to resize a partition in the future.  I would love to have a Vista partition and a data partition if it is not too difficult.

The Hitachi 2tb drive (E:) is my external USB.  On this drive I've made a recovery point that contains both the 1.46 GB partition and the Vista C: drive.

Also, Dave posted the link to Toshiba that contains another scenario with the system restore utility in another partition. (In this scenario the on the Toshiba site the 1.46 GB partition is listed as active.)  Is it a good idea to have the system restore utility on another partition or a waste of space?  I really don't want to complicate things either.

Thank you both so much.   Please let me know if you need additional information.

Sincerely,

Allen

[alja1]

I'm also wondering if I could do the following with success even though it is a different approach:

1) I have a recovery point containing both partitions on an external USB drive.

2) Install the new drive either formatted or unformatted.

3) I've already created a customized Ghost recovery disk (which took a looooooog time...over night actually).  I've booted from it and it seems to work great.  Boot from the recovery disk and then recover the above mentioned recovery point (both partitions) to the new drive.

My question is: Would my system boot and would the drive be identical to my existing drive?  I'm throwing this out there because I just would like to upgrade to this new drive the right way and I don't really know the best way to do it.

I also noticed when I booted from the customized recovery disk for testing purposes that there was an X: drive, something like a boot partition.  I'm assuming this had something to do with booting from the recovery disk.

Thanks in advance for all your help.

Allen

[redk9258]

See notes below...

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alja1 wrote:

I'm also wondering if I could do the following with success even though it is a different approach:

1) I have a recovery point containing both partitions on an external USB drive.

2) Install the new drive either formatted or unformatted.

3) I've already created a customized Ghost recovery disk (which took a looooooog time...over night actually).  I've booted from it and it seems to work great.  Boot from the recovery disk and then recover the above mentioned recovery point (both partitions) to the new drive.

My question is: Would my system boot and would the drive be identical to my existing drive?  I'm throwing this out there because I just would like to upgrade to this new drive the right way and I don't really know the best way to do it.

What you described is the prefered way to copy your drive in my book.

Make image (recovery point) on secondary HDD.

Shut down PC.

Remove old HDD / install new HDD.

Boot from Recovery disc (SRD).

Recover image to new drive. (Make sre to delete the second partition and fill empty space if you want to and the new HDD is larger than the old one).

Should boot without problems and act the same as when you imaged your PC.

See this post for some info on the options for resizing the drive.

I also noticed when I booted from the customized recovery disk for testing purposes that there was an X: drive, something like a boot partition.  I'm assuming this had something to do with booting from the recovery disk.

The X drive is the windows PE environment. It comes from SRD\sources\boot.wim. It basically gets extracted into RAM and runs from there. Since it runs in RAM, you can remove the recovery disc. Anychanges done to the X drive will be discarded when you shut down the PC.

Thanks in advance for all your help.

No problem

Allen

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[alja1]

Thank you Red!

I'm going to try it and I'll post the results.

I do have some questions before I begin.

On my existing drive I have the two partitions: C: containing Vista and data and the Toshiba empty 1.46 GB EISA configuration.

When you say:  "Make sre to delete the second partition..." Do I delete the EISA partition from my existing restore point so I have a restore point only containing the C: partition OR do I restore both partitions to the new drive and then delete it?  At what point do I delete the Toshiba 1.46 GB EISA partition.  And I'm assuming that this has no functional value.

I'll wait to hear from you before proceeding?

Thank you so much Red.

[redk9258]

Refer to the pictures that I linked to in my last post, to get an idea of what I am talking about.

When you do the restore, depending on if the new HDD is blank or has partitions on it will depend on what you need to do in the "Recover My Computer" wizard. There is a pull down in the menu that let's you pick Date, Filename or System...

If you pick by filename, you will have to browse for the backup image file (v2i or iv2i) of that EISA partition first. Then hit ADD and browse for your C Drive image file (v2i or iv2i). In this situation, I think you will have the option to fill empty space at that point.

If you choose system or date, you will have to have the sv2i file that is created with a hot backup. It is not created with a cold backup made from the SRD. If you use either of these options, you will have to edit the target drive to utilize all of the new space.

On any account, I would hit the edit button and choose these options..

Verify Recovery Point (unless you already verified them)

EISA partition:

-Restore disk signature

C Drive partition:

-Resize drive after recover (unallocated space only) -- This will default to fill the entire drive. If you want another partition for data then you will need to reduce this number by however big you want the data partition.

-Set drive active (for booting OS)

-Restore original disk signature

-Restore MBR

Just to let you know nothing is actually changed on the target disk until you hit the "Finish" button at the end of the wizard.

Since your original drive will be disconnected, you should feel pretty safe experimenting around. If it goes wrong, you can always start over since it isn't your main drive.

[Brian_K]

I agree with the image/ restore approach.

The 1.46 GB partition may not be necessary as you have Ghost images as a backup.

[DaveH]

It also might not be necessary because it may be empty. LOL

I can't figure out if it's really empty or if disk management has trouble reading it.