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Our latest Q & A of the week comes from Mark via
the PCstats feedback page
. If you
have a question you need answered right away, try our friendly forums
for help too.
Q: First I wanted to express my appreciation for a very
well written, concise explanation of cloning which your site has provided.
This is exactly what I wished to do with my HP Pavilion in order to replace a
noisy hard drive with a larger one. I selected Norton Ghost based on your
explanation and received Norton Ghost 9.0 in the mail which I loaded and
updated.
Unfortunately it
bears little resemblance to the screen shots you displayed and does not have an
'advanced' procedure. It will not permit the selection of multiple
partitions (which my HP has) but in the help section describes that each must be
cloned individually using the wizard. However this does not work as the
second time you select a source partition, Ghost simply overwrites the first
partition. And, simply cloning the main portion and leaving out the
relatively small HP emergency back-up partition (the second small partition)
does not work even when you tell Ghost the first is to be a Master Boot Record
and the primary OS.
A: Sadly, Symantec has pulled a bit of a switch with
Norton Ghost 9.0. Instead of being an upgraded version of previous
releases, Ghost 9 is actually a rebranded, slightly changed version of Acronis
Drive Image 7 (or possibly 8x?) which Symantec purchased a while ago. This
means it has a completely different user interface as well as different
capabilities.
When I tested Ghost 9, I was able to copy multiple partitions, though they
must be copied one at a time as you say. I did run into some initial
problems though. The method I settled on was to remove all partitions on
the destination drive, then copy over the first partition (in your case, the HP
restore partition). Once that operation was finished, I created a
partition on the remainder of the destination disk and gave it an arbitrary
drive letter. Finally I copied over the second source partition (which
would be your main drive) to this newly created target drive letter, ensuring
that I copied the MBR and made it the OS boot drive at the same time.
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