Monday, December 3, 2007

Clone Your Hard Drive With Ghost 2003

Clone Your Hard Drive With Ghost 2003

So you want to upgrade your hard drive to a larger and faster drive but do not want to install the Operating System and programs. The solution, use Ghost 2003.

Here is a short tutorial that will quickly explain how to use Ghost 2003 to clone your hard drive to another hard drive. This is very useful for someone that wants to install a larger hard drive but doesn't want to go through the effort of reinstalling the operating system and all of their programs. When you do this, your new disk should be the same size or larger than the original hard disk.

I will make the assumption that you have the new hard drive installed in the media bay and want to clone the main drive to the media bay hard drive. The new hard drive should already be installed in the media bay. If you need instructions on how to do this, visit these pages if you have a Dell C-Series Notebook or D-Series Notebook. NOTE: This same procedure can be used to Ghost any drive. You will just have to make the correct modifications to the instructions.

I will use the Ghost Wizard to accomplish this task.



Your new drive should already be in the media bay. If it is not, do so before proceeding any further.

Start Ghost 2003. When you see the opening dialog, click on the "Ghost Advanced" button in the left column. Then click on the "Clone" button.

When this screen appears, just click on the "Next" button.

You need to select your "Source". Since we want to clone the entire disk, click on "Disk 1" in the Source column. This will automatically select all of the partitions.

Now you need to select the "Destination" drive. Click on "Disk 2". Since the drive is empty, there are no folders showing.

You may notice that the my Destination Drive is smaller than my Source Drive. I just using it for demonstration purposes.

You may or may not see this screen. I have IEEE 1394 enabled. If you see this screen, just click on the "Cancel" button. We will not be using the IEEE 1394 port to transfer the data.
Click on the "Next" button.

This dialog just informs you what is going to happen next.

Click on the "Next" button.

Here is shows you the options that you have selected. We are cloning Disk 1 to Disk 2.

Make sure that you have the AC power plugged in.

Then click on the "OK" button and let Ghost perform the cloning. Once it completes, put your new drive in the main hard drive slot. The operating system will detect that you have new hardware installed. Once that is complete, you now have a working clone image of your original hard drive.