Can someone point to the detailed instructions how to upgrade to a mew HDD?
I have an old gateway desktop running win7 and habe ghost 15 installed.
I want to install a newer, bigger harddrive, clone the old one (c:), take out the old one and use the new one as c:
The ghost manual tells you how to use the ghost sw but not how to prepare the new drive before running ghost or what steps to take after the ghost completes.
The old drive has two partitions, d: seems to be a recovery partition. Do I need to copy this partition too?
Thanks
Hi Lauren,
Usually windows 7 has a hidden partition that you may not have noticed.
Please open disk management by clicking the Start button and typing diskmgmt.msc into the search window.
Then follow the instructions here and post a screen shot of what you see.
It may take a while for the image to be approved, in the meanwhile tell us if you see any other hidden partitions.
Dave
Hi
Here's the info, thanks, ....
FYI: The signature drive is an external USB drive.
Thanks for posting that, it's helpfull to know the recovery partition is before the C drive.
The recovery partition may or may not be important to you. The only reason I can think of keeping it is if you ever decide to sell or give away the computer and you want to restore it to factory state so it no longer contains all your programs and data.
Besides that, if your system is running well and your using Ghost, Ghost becomes your system backup.
So it's up to you if you want to keep it or not.
Restoring the system without the recovery partition will take an extra step to repair the boot because moving the C partition to the front of the drive will require a startup repair.
Here is how you would eliminate the recovery partition on a new hard drive, let us know if you decide the keep it.
Since you have an external drive with enough free space, I think creating an image and restoring it on the new drive would be the easier way. You only have to change the hard drives once that way.
Open Ghost and create a "one time backup" onto the external drive. (make the system image, not the file and folder backup).
When thats done, follow these instructions to create a Windows 7 startup repair disk.
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/5409/create-a-system-repair-disc-in-windows-7/
Then boot the system with the Ghost recovery disk and make sure you can access both the hard drive and the removable drive. Go to Analyze > Explore my Computer and make sure you can see both drives.
If you can, shut down the system, unplug it and replace the hard drive with the new one. (Do not leave the old drive connected to the system)
After it's been changed, boot back up with the Ghost recovery disk and select "recover my computer"
Browse to the external drive and select the image file. At that point Ghost will pop up a box saying it has detected a new drive and ask you if you want it "initilized", click Yes.
After you select the image file you get to a screen "Drives to recover", click the "Edit" button.
You should see both the new hard drive and the external drive, the new hard drive should be shown as unallocated space.
If for any reason it shows "phantom" partitions you will need to delete them, but be very carefull you do not delete the external drive. (It may show the layout of the old drive with 2 partitions).
Then select the recovery options from Brians post here:
You want these:
Restore to a new HD if a SRP is not present
Verify recovery point before restore
Resize drive after recover (unallocated space only) (ONLY if you want to)
Partition type : Primary
Check for file system errors after recovery
Set drive active (for booting OS)
Restore original disk signature
Restore master boot record
For the second option (resizing the drive) I assume you are changing to a larger hard drive and would like to make the C drive bigger. However, your not using very much of the existing C drive right now and I would reccomend not using the whole drive and later creating another partition for your data and Ghost backups. But that choice is up to you.
After the image is restored, reboot the system and remove the Ghost disk and replace it with the Windows 7 startup repair disk.
Follow those instructions on that web page to to fix the system boot.
At that point you should be able to boot into windows on your new drive.
Dave
Thanks a lot
I got to the point i recovered my image to the new drive. I did that but the drive doesnt show up in the explore my computer after i finished the recovery.
And I couldnt find a way to set the recovery parameters before or after recovering the image. Im suspecting now they must be set when doing the one time image backup?
I hooked up the original drive again and rebooted. When i try to run ghost one time backup i cant find a way to set the parameters you listed so i am at a roadblock.
At this point i have two options: 1) finish what i started after some kind person lets me know why im at a roadblock, or 2) now that the new drive appears to be f: and is a local drive, should i instead use the copy drive function and copy from c: to f: ? If i should switch to option 2, after i copy the hard drive, do i remove the old one and the new one will reappear as c: ?
Those options are found when restoring an image.
Remove the old drive and replace it with the new drive, the new drive needs to be connected to the primary drive cable.
Boot to the Ghost recovery disk, select "recover my computer". Browse to the image file and select it.
After you select the image file, on the next screen you need to click the "Edit" button, thats where the settings are.
The Edit button is on the right hand side of the screen.
The top section will show your hard drive and removable drive. Highlight and delete the partitions on your new drive so the whole drive is unallocated space. (be careful you don't delete your external drive).
Then on the bottom of that screen, set the recovery options as listed above. You will also see the option to expand the partition to a larger size, that option is only availible if your recovering into an empty drive with unallocated space.
Please only have the new drive installed at that point.
Dave
The forum is not allowing me to post screenshots from someone elses gallery.
http://community.norton.com/t5/media/gallerypage/user-id/30419/image-id/14062iD6E8EE7454207B8F
That image above (Thanks Red) shows the screen after you select the image file, the cursor is on the "edit" button.
http://community.norton.com/t5/media/gallerypage/user-id/30419/image-id/14064i483D5642ECBC4213
Thats the screen you get after clicking the Edit button, that is where you find the recovery options.
Also note that it shows 2 hard drives, like yours will. Hard drive 1 is the new hard drive and contains a partition and some unallocated space.
Hard drive 2 would be your removable drive containing the image.
The partition on hard drive one needs to be deleted by highlighting it and clicking the button shown.
Only when the hard drive is all unallocated space will the option to resize the drive become availible.
Thanks to Red for the screenshots.
Dave
Thanks for your help
That same button on my system is named “remove”, not edit. The top two buttons are add and change. I ran thru the whole “restore my computer” wizard and nowhere could i edit the parameters.
My ghost recovery disk is version 14. The ghost sw on my pc is version 15; i seem to recall i got a free upgrade online to 15 shortly after buying the ghost 14 cd from a local store. Maybe the version explains the difference?
I may have another complication: the original drive is IDE. The new drive is SATA and plugged into a different SATA connector on the mother board. Is that a problem?
Many thanks
I don't have a Ghost 14 recovery disk, but it would have to have a place to specify the recovery settings.
As for the drives being different, yes that is a possible problem.
When you had both drives installed at the same time, did you or windows install SATA drivers so the drive could be accessed?
Dave
Edit- another couple questions. Either way you go about this you will need to know how to enter the system BIOS and change the boot sequence from IDE to the primary SATA port.
Do you know how to get into the system BIOS?
I got it working.
Heres what i did
- installed new drive (old drive not removed yet)
- used ghost copy drive function instead of one time copy
- disconnected old drive
- boot up with new drive. I get blue screen and windows 7 not genuine message.
- reboot into safe mode
- start regedit in a cmd window and reassign drive letter of old drive from c: to p: and reassign drive letter from f: to c:
- reboot system and now the new drive works and is known as c:
- use diskmgt.msc to reallocate all unallocated space on new drive
- go to ghost and delete references to old drive and restore point refetences to old restore points for old drive and then do a kne time backup of new disk.
- thats it
Thanks for the help
Lauren2008 wrote:
- boot up with new drive. I get blue screen and windows 7 not genuine message.
Lauren2008,
Do you know why this error occurred?
Nice fix by the way.
Not really sure why that happens
I googled for a solution(change the drive letters using regedit) and tried it, and it worked.
Thanks
Lauren2008 wrote:
Not really sure why that happens
Lauren2008,
You copied into a partition with a drive letter. It's the most common Copy Drive error we see.
WinXP and Win7 stall on different screens.