I am using Norton Ghost 14. I have a new hard drive for my laptop, and I want to copy the existing drive to the new drive. However, I can't copy it directly using Copy My Hard Drive because I can only have 1 hard drive in my laptop at any given time.
My plan was to do a one-time backup to an external hard drive, swap the internal hard drives, and then boot to the Norton CD and "recover" to the new hard drive from the image on the external drive. Is there a better way to do this?
Also, Norton Ghost 10 had an option to include the MBR in a normal backup but this option seems to have been removed in Norton Ghost 14 - it seems like you have to Copy My Hard Drive for this behavior now. I am concerned that if I restore from a one-time backup rather than Copy My Hard Drive, it won't be a full copy (and e.g. might mess up the boot sequence or invalidate my Windows license).
Any information on either of these points would be appreciated. Thanks!
Message Edited by eliot1785 on 12-15-2009 10:50 AM
Welcome to the forum. What is your full version of Ghost? You can get this from Help > About.
You have the process basically correct and in reality doing a backup/restore is more straight forward and less error prone than doing a Copy Drive anyway. Yes, the MBR is included in the backup so no worries there. When you do get around to doing a recovery, there are options to allow you to either restore or not restore the MBR and also other valuable options.
I would suggest configuring a normal backup job which runs at certain times than doing just a one time backup however.
There are other things to think about with your laptop. What type of laptop is it? Most OEM computers (including laptops) come with one or more hidden recovery partitions which you should also back up. In Ghost you can see this if you select Show Hidden Drives option. For the recovery partitions you can do just a one time backup of those since they never change. For the OS and other partitions you might have, you should create a regular backup job. Built into this backup job is a schedule which will tell Ghost when to run the job and how often to do a base (full) backup. In between those times Ghost would perform an incremental backup.
Please provide your partitioning information for your laptop and I can guide you further on how to do the restore piece. You can get this from Windows Disk Managment or alternatively run the file called PartInfo.exe which is located in the Program Files/Norton Ghost/Utility directory. This will create a file called partinfo.txt which you can attach to your post by using the Add Attachments link at the bottom.