My son is a senior architecture student and has a ton of apps loaded on his Toshiba A205 Satellite Vista laptop and twice in the past he has had drive problems at the most inopportune times. So we want to have a complete backup c drive he can just pop in next time this happens. We have tried twice to copy the c drive to a new blank drive installed in the second drive bay using Norton Ghost 14 unsuccessfully. The original c drive is 350 GB with about 180 GB data and about 170 GB free space. The new blank drive is 250 GB, which is larger than the used space on the c drive, so if I read the instructions correctly that shouldn't be a problem. On the first attempt, he formatted the new drive and gave it letter D using the disk management control panel. (I have since read that there shouldn't be a letter assigned.) We then used the disk copy feature of Ghost and all seemed to go well. To test, we removed the c drive and replaced with the new copy, and it seemed to want to boot but when it came to the "preparing your desktop" screen it hung with a blank screen.
So we did some online research and found out that the new drive shouldn't have a drive letter, so we put the original drive back in its place, and the new one in the second bay reformatted with no drive letter and proceeded again. Now when putting the new drive in place of the original c drive, it hangs immediately upon startup with an error message relating to the winlogon.exe file being either missing or corrupted.
I have since realized there may be one other complication, and that is a small unlettered, unnamed, "invisible" recovery partition. (It currently shows as just "1.43 GB, Healthy.") I have since read that a disk with more than one partition should have each copied separately. I don't know if that was the problem in the first two tries, but now that I am aware of it, I would like to take that into consideration before proceeding again.
So we are here at your mercy asking for help! Any and all comments will be welcomed.
I assume we should completely reformat and make two unnamed, unlettered partitions, say one 5 GB, and one 245 GB.
The one option we didn't check and possibly should have, had something to do with having it completely fill the new volume.
TIA,
Charles