I have a friend who is a lawyer. He was given a 120 GB IDE Hard Drive that has the cloned hard drives from 10 computers on it (i.e. you open the 120 GB drive, and you see 10 hard drives, each with a separate letter g,h,i,k and so fourth). He needs this information transferred to another hard drive, because he must return the original. He bought an external 250 GB hard drive, and I did the transfer. I basically copied and pasted all the information from the 120 GB hard drive into 10 separate folders on the external drive (I made no partitions, cloned nothing, just copied.) It worked,all the files are there, but anytime I go to open a file on the external drive, I get an error "Can't open file, please make sure the disk is inserted." I have Norton Ghost 2003, and I tried to make clone of the 120 GB hard drive, but Norton had a fit because I was using USB drivers. My question is: How can I make it so this external hard drive has a viable copy of the data???? This hard drive has to be returned by Next Tuesday. Thanks in advance for any help.

Hi, Not sure what you are asking. You can not COPY, Drag and Drop etc any drive and have the new one boot and run successfully. XP has a Cloning program. Don't remember what it calls it and my XP sys is not connected at the moment. It's pretty obvious when you find it. Any HD maker's site will also have programs to CLONE a drive. CLONE means to copy everything on the drive, hidden, sys boot etc. Maxtor's is called MAXBLAST. It will clone any partition to a new HD. It says PARTITION but means Partition or Drive. It will also partition and format the new drive. Clone will automatically do that for you. Be carefull to specify the correct drives. Hope this helps a bit, Jim

Western Digital has a program that allows you to clone two WD HDs, its call Data lifeguard Pentium 4 3.6Ghz Prescott Asus P5WD2 Premium Corsair XMS 2Gig DDR2 667Mhz X700Pro 256MB GDDR3 WD Raptor 36.7GB WD 250GB 16MB SATA II Coolermaster 430Watt I don't have a case, yet I enjoy not having one

OK, first we need to understand EXACTLY what youare trying to accomplish. IF the conents of the partitions on the customer drive are EXACT REPLICAS of the contents of other drives (as I suspect they do) then you do not want to simply copy and paste. Since I am assuming the contents of the drives may be involved in some sort of litigation they you definitely do want to copy exact images of those partitions. That will ensure that you get everything including hidden files and boot files if these happen to be the boot drives from multiple machines. Go back to Ghost and instead of cloning the entire drive try copying each partition one at a time to see if that works. If it still won't work using the drive as an external, just remove the drive from the external enclosure and install it internally. Persoanlly at the very least I would create an image of every partition on that drive and save them to DVD - in addition to copying them to the external drive. Michael J

"He was given a 120 GB IDE Hard Drive that has the cloned hard drives from 10 computers on it" What program was used to clone these drives?

Hi Bad, Try Maxblast or any good CLONING program. Jim

try free disk copy software - EASEUS Disk Copy