SubscribeMigrating Data from One Drive to Another the Hard Way
Posted on Nov 26, 2007 under Blog |I migrated from my old 80GB EIDE hard drive over to my new 400GB SATA drive the long and hard way. I wasted many hours getting all of my old data, including the boot sector over to the new drive all because I made it more complex than it really turned out to be.
Since I worked at a helpdesk before, I became really familiar with Norton Ghost. I thought using Ghost was the only way I could get an image from a drive and put it on another one. I didn’t legally own a copy of Ghost though. So I scoured the web for another solution. I came across Partimage, a free alternative to Ghost. With hardly any knowledge about Linux, I struggled to simply create an image since I had to learn all about mounting NTFS drives and such. I finally worked that out and got the image copied. Finally I was able to image my new drive.
So I removed the old EIDE drive and expected my new SATA drive to boot into Windows without problems. Well, not so fast. I got the blue screen on the first try. The second try, Windows locked up and wouldn’t do a thing. My approach had failed. Still, all of the data was on the new drive. It was just the boot sequence just didn’t work.
So now I figure that if I somehow repaired the boot sector using FIXMB and FIXBOOT, it surely would work. I booted my Windows XP CD to run the Recovery Console. This didn’t work because it didn’t detect my new hard drive for some reason. The BIOS was seeing it fine, but not the Windows XP Setup CD. Perhaps it needs me to press F6 and load third party drivers?
Off to the Western Digital web site to see if they had any info. During my search, I happened upon a download titled Data LifeGuard Tools.What does this handy little utility do? Well, it runs in Windows and enables you to be just a few clicks away from copying data, including boot information from one drive to another. Suddenly I was transferring the data without a hitch. Of course, it’s not that simple for me since I like to make things more complex. After the LifeGuard software copied the data, I shut down the computer and decided to unplug the SATA drive and move stuff around in the computer case. Thinking it wouldn’t matter, I plugged the SATA drive into a different spot. When I booted up, the computer locked up.
I finally got smart and plugged it back into the spot it was plugged into before, and tried again. Success! It worked perfectly. Apparently most hard drive manufacturers have these utilities available. I always ignored them just thinking they were rebranded versions of common hard drive utilites already included with Windows. In all it took about 6 hours for me to figure out that there was a utility that could’ve gotten the job done in under a half hour. I’ll know better next time. Now I’m off to configure my old EIDE hard drive to work in my Tivo. Let’s hope I don’t waste more time than I have to doing that.
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