wrote in message
oups.com...
I'm beyond aggravated. I've upgraged dozens of hard drives in the past
using the floppy to format the new drive and copy the original drive
over to the new one. Apparently the days of simplicity are over. I
tried using the Maxtor Maxblast software since the new drive is a
Maxtor 80g ata133 7200rpm (the old is a 28g Western Digital.) Maxtor
says to use the Windows based version of the program. In the oldern
days there was no such thing, and for good reason - if any files are in
use in your Windows session, how will you be able to copy them to the
new drive sucessfully? This results in failed attempt number one,
since when I reboot all the Norton software on the system is messed up.
Systemworks 2006 needs to be reactivated. Antivirus 2006 shows that
it's running in the system tray, but the system checker thing says that
no antivirus software is present. Blah, blah, blah - bottom line - it
didn't work. So I start over and use the DOS version of the software
off of a bootable CD. I format the new drive, but the automatic
process of asking if you want to copy everything over and make the new
drive the boot drive is mysteriously gone. So I manually use the
utility that copies a hard drive partition to move the old drive to the
new. Only the new drive won't boot. Apparently when you format it,
the program sticks some files on the drive depending on what OS you
intend to install later. Maybe this is the cause of the problem now -
I don't know for sure. I give up. I try one more time with the
Windows version, but this time I went into the startup section of
msconfig to disable every single Norton product and then manually
stopped another 4 or 5 Symantec processes in the task manager. Surely
it would work this time. Nope. Identical problem - no antivirus
installed and every attempt to uninstall or reinstall fails miserably.
Is there a nice simple DOS program that I can run that will format the
new drive, copy the old to the new, and make the new drive bootable?
Thanks in advance for any help.


I've used cloning software over many years starting with the first version
of Ghost and through to the latest versions of True Image.

I now think the age of disk cloning has gone (IMHO - Flame suit ON).
Reasons?

1. With people changing hardware so often, many problems occur when trying
to clone a disk image onto new hardware.

2. How often do people really do a full clone?

3. Windows becomes full of useless, old, corrupt drivers, software.

4. Just look at the problems posted in this group?

Personally I now copy/backup the Documents and setting folders; that way I
just install my existing or new operating system on to my original or new
hardware or new hard disk. Install all updates, patches, latest drivers and
then copy what data I really need from my backups of Documents and setting.

Clive