Swapping hard drives

[theburan]

Ok, so here's my problem right now. I have a nice clear case, with full of nice quiet 80mm fans (thank goodness for fan controllers), and a really, really noisy hard drive. We're talking high pitched whine of hate kind of annoying. It works fine and everything, and if it were buried in a different case, it'd be fine.

So, I also have a 2nd computer, with a nice Samsung hard drive that should be quite a bit quieter. The problem is that this samsung hard drive is all setup with the xp install like it came from hp, and I'd like to keep the restore partition intact on whatever hard drive (probably the western digital) will replace it, so that when I donate that computer the recipient can recover windows and whatnot nice and easily.

On that same note, it'd be pretty nifty to keep the image on my western digital the same when I put it on the samsung, to keep everything nice and tidy.

Anyone know of any programs (preferably free and open source) that would let me take the image from both hard drives, and swap them around, in such a way that both drives are perfectly usable afterwards? I think nortan ghost and some similar programs might do it, but I'm not for sure on this, and i'd like a second opinion before doing something.

[RangerXLT8]

Originally Posted by theburan

Ok, so here's my problem right now. I have a nice clear case, with full of nice quiet 80mm fans (thank goodness for fan controllers), and a really, really noisy hard drive. We're talking high pitched whine of hate kind of annoying. It works fine and everything, and if it were buried in a different case, it'd be fine.

So, I also have a 2nd computer, with a nice Samsung hard drive that should be quite a bit quieter. The problem is that this samsung hard drive is all setup with the xp install like it came from hp, and I'd like to keep the restore partition intact on whatever hard drive (probably the western digital) will replace it, so that when I donate that computer the recipient can recover windows and whatnot nice and easily.

On that same note, it'd be pretty nifty to keep the image on my western digital the same when I put it on the samsung, to keep everything nice and tidy.

Anyone know of any programs (preferably free and open source) that would let me take the image from both hard drives, and swap them around, in such a way that both drives are perfectly usable afterwards? I think nortan ghost and some similar programs might do it, but I'm not for sure on this, and i'd like a second opinion before doing something.

This is stuff is not easy. Western digital has a disk copy utility, but it does not work in Vista, and you need a WD drive to use it. Most disk manufacturers have these tools available on their websites free, but you need that brand of hdd to use the utility. Do a google of bianary copying and how to do it.

[theburan]

Ok, thanks, I'll look into that (good thing both these computers are using xp... but not so good that they're different manufacturers. )

[Stormcrow]

Clonezilla

Keep in mind you can only clone to a hard drive of equal size or larger with most utilities, I haven't come across one yet that lets you take a larger partition and shrink it to fit into a smaller drive. That being said, my old Seagate has that in your face screaming seeking noise, my somewhat newer WD clunks on occasion like when defragging, and this new Seagate (the one with the 32mb cache) is dead silent.

[theburan]

Hmmm, I'll have to look into this when i get home. Thanks for the linkage!

[stinger608]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

Clonezilla

Keep in mind you can only clone to a hard drive of equal size or larger with most utilities, I haven't come across one yet that lets you take a larger partition and shrink it to fit into a smaller drive. That being said, my old Seagate has that in your face screaming seeking noise, my somewhat newer WD clunks on occasion like when defragging, and this new Seagate (the one with the 32mb cache) is dead silent.

Now that seems like it would be a very useful tool!!!