Copying Windows from Hard Drive-> Hard Drive
 

Hello

I have a bit of a strange situation, where I have two hard drives and I want to copy windows from one to the other. I thought I could use Ghost for this (as the original drive has a nice 5gb partition with just windows on it), but the other drive has lots of data and it appears to want to erase it all to re-install the image.

Any suggestions?

Thanks for your help,

Steve

The only way to copy windows is to actually clone the original drive over the destination drive. This is due to things such as Bootstraps and also the boot.ini file will contain partition info on where windows is kept. That's if you're intention is to boot up from the other disk after the copy. The other option is to use ghost but to copy the windows partition into a ghost image file. Which should just be copied over to the destination drive without the need to overwrite anything in the process.

If the destination drive has enough room use a partition manager to reduce the size of the partition with the data then create another partition with enough room for the source drive.

Thinking about it a bit more you'd also need to make the new partition active

If you are afraid(unsure) about your data, write it all to cd or dvd first.

Other than that, do as suggested.
What are the sizes of the hard drives, how is each partitioned, and how much free space on each partition ?
have a feeling you may have to do some juggling