I have a 40GB drive I want to clone an old 9GB Windows ME drive to in order to upgrade the drive. I've been reading the installation manual thatr came with the Western Digital drive. The package comes with a program called Data Lifeguard EZ Install that will clone the new drive, but then the manual has this to say about cloning an ME drive: "IMPORTANT: Due to how Windows ME boots, System Files copied to a drive using a Windows ME boot disk will not make the drive bootable. To boot to the drive, you must install Windows ME." Now, I don't plan on using The Western Digital cloning program anyway but Norton Ghost, but this warning concerns me because the person whose machine I'm going to clone does not have any of the original installation CDs including the Windows ME disc(his old assistant put them somewhere no one knows where). Does this warning mean that Windows ME cannot be cloned to another drive without a Windows ME installation CD-ROM for help? Is there a special problem cloning a Windows ME drive to another even using a program like Ghost? Won't cloning Partition to Parition (I want to partition the larger drive into 3 partitions, cloning the old drive to the 1st partition) using Ghost copy everything so identically that THAT would make the newly cloned 40gig drive bootable? Very confused by this Western Digital warning.

hello
i,m useing a clone of m.e right now to answer this.i guess you can do it or i,m not here.but if your going to clone the drive and use in anther computer it gets tricky. ive done this.heres how i did it.
allso once you clone a drive dont start computers with both dives still in same computer with the same o/s as it will rip the registrys out of both copys. (scanreg /restore will fix)
ok after cloneing the new drive remove the old drive set the new drive as master.
remove any modems sound cardsor other pci cards external drives.restart computer,shut computer back off remove new cloed drive.the reason for this is when you put the new drive in the other computer it wont be looking for your hard ware.. you can reinstall your old drive and pci cards in your computer.now remove any pic i cards from the frends computer external drives and put cloned drive in his computer.as master.
restart computer and pray that it dont have bios conflict or other problems.it should go
next add one pci card and reboot goto add new hardware and use wizzerd to reinstall drivers ect.repeat for any thing else.
if it dont reconize cd-rw,e ect removeing restarting shuting back off and add new is the way to got. be sure powers off at install and removel and ground your self for static discharges.
have a nice day

Thanks wavadave for help. I don't plan on putting the new cloned drive in a different macvhine so my job should be a lot easier, but I am interested in how you'd go about putting a cloned drive in a different machine. How about this way. After you clone the new drive, take the old one out, set the new clone as master, then go into Device Manager and remove all removeable hardware. Then shut power off, remove drive and put it in different machine. Then turn the other machine on and let it configure all the previously removed hardware devices according to its own hardware environment. Would that work, you think? Also I heard somewheree that you could delete some setting in the registry to remove hardware before transferring cloned hard drive into a different machine.

Another question: When cloning from partition to a partition that was just fdisked and formatted, do you need to set the destination partition as active?

Also, someone told me that when you format the destination drive/partition you shoulkdn't use the /s switch.

Partition with fdisk, set active, then Ghost. Ghost will automatically reformat to suit as part of the process.