Ive been waiting soooooo long for Canadian Boxing Day where we get great deals on stuff. So, in 2 days, i will be purchasing a Western Digital 250GB hard drive to replace my almost full Maxtor 40GB. I dont want to have to reinstall everything, so i will try doing that hard drive ghosting thing. Problem is i have no idea of how to do this. Some information about my current situation: Maxtor drive is partitioned almost in half. C drive is 18.6GB and D drive is 19.6GB. C contains Windows XP Pro SP1. Both drives contain saved files, music and games with saved game files. I would like both partitions put onto the new drive. Will i need to have 2 partitions for them if it can be done? what is reccomended amount of partitions for 250GB? Should i leave some unpartitioned for now? and how to perform a ghosting? hope its not too many questions for you guys. thanks.

How to partition is usually kind of a personal preference thing. But probably the simplest thing to do is make two partitions of equal size. One way to do it is to run Ghost and have it image the complete drive. Then have it create two equal partitions on the new drive. Or you could image one drive at a time and tell Ghost to create 125GB partitions (actually they will be a little smaller). Or you could make smaller drives and leave some space free for future drives.

This program "Ghost". Is it downloadable, and if so, where? and thanks for the response

Norton Ghost is a product of Symantec ( http://www.symantec.com/home_homeoffice/products/backup_recovery/ghost10/index.html ) Alternative is TrueImage from Acronis ( http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/ ) I myself like TrueImage more, because lately Norton products are really crap.

I agree with Studentin about Norton products, but the newest Ghost is really Powerquest's superior Drive Image. Symantec bought out Powerquest, dumped Norton's Ghost and converted Drive Image to Ghost version 9. Sorry, I do not check for private messages

When you buy your new HDD, it will come with software that will enable you to clone the old drive. I believe it's called Data Lifeguard...you can also download it from the WDC website for free This space for rent

"""When you buy your new HDD, it will come with software that will enable you to clone the old drive""" Thanks jam, I was just about to say that. Software supplied with new hard drives may or may not have enough features to handle special partition situations, but I'd certainly have a look before I went out and bought Norton Ghost. I do use Ghost here, the newest version I have is 2003--It will handle XP, and does not need to be activated. That is, Ghost 2003 does not need to be activated.