OK, my old Dell's 60GB disk has been getting noisy, so I decided to replace it. I bought a 120GB and installed it as the slave. The old disk still boots fine, and the new disk is recognized. I want to clone the old disk onto the new, and stop using the old. It has 3 primary partitions (Dell Utilities, Linux boot, Win NTFS (C:)) and 1 extended (Linux swap, FAT32 (F:), ext3 Linux files). I tried Norton Ghost (Symantec SystemWorks 2003 Pro), but it kept giving me all sorts of excuses about "no primary slots available" or "not enough free space to defragment" certain files (even after running My Computer's defrag dozens of times). The Help told me to boot DOS and use Ghost in DOS mode. OK, I tried the Disaster Recovery floppies created by Ghost -- wouldn't boot. I tried a boot floppy created by My Computer -- it's Win ME and refuses to recognize the C: NTFS partition. I tried running the Ghost disk anyway, and it couldn't see the NTFS partition and didn't claim to see the new disk. Anyone have experience using Ghost to do this? So, I tried another tack. I have Partition Magic 8.0, and used it to create duplicate partitions on the new disk and copy the old partitions over. I have the partitions copied, but all are "inactive" or "hidden". What do I do now? I have Bootmagic 8.0 too, and Ubuntu (Debian) Linux, if I can make use of any of its utilities. My plan is, once I'm sure the new disk is cleanly copied, and the partitions are configured properly, to unplug the old disk and jumper the new to master (with the data cable moved) and boot up on the new disk. How can I achieve this? Anyone with experience doing this?

You don't need any 3rd party software. Just install the new HDD as primary master & the old HDD on the 2ndary channel (master or slave - makes no difference). Boot off the CD that *should* have come with the new drive & follow the instructions for how to copy the drive. If you didn't get a disc, go to the HDD manufacturer's website & download a copy.

Ghost 2003 run from the dos boot disk will format and partition and clone the drive to be cloned. It is the boot disk you create from the ghost menu.

jam, I did not receive a disc with the drive. I will see if W.D. has an image on their site. per, I created a two-floppy "disaster recovery" bootable disk set from Ghost, but as I said, it refuses to boot. If I boot off the Win ME floppy produced by Win XP, and run the ghost floppy from that, it doesn't even see the new drive. I will look again to see if there is some other option in Ghost to create a boot disk. I posted my question because I didn't want to get wedged by burning my bridges behind me, only to find that I was unable to boot the new disk after using either fdisk or BootMagic to twiddle with the partition settings. I don't know for sure what's in the partition boot records, or what's in the Master Boot Record on the disk. Let me try the suggestions in your replies and we'll see what happens. I just want to be comfortable that I can get back to booting the old disk if things go terribly wrong.

OK, I downloaded "Data Lifeguard Tools" from the WD site. I found that Roxio cannot burn an .iso file, so I went over to Linux and used Nautilus to burn a disc. It's not bootable, but at least I can run the utility to copy over the disk. It's been sitting at the first step of "Creating Partitions" for hours. Windows Task Manager shows 0% CPU usage for this task. How long should something like this take? I hit the "Cancel" button and waited half an hour for something to happen before using WTM to kill the process. This Western Digital software really sucks! If it's really doing something, it ought to tell me what its status is. When nothing changes for that long, I have to assume that it's hung up somewhere. Anyway, I ran PartitionMagic 8.0 and it shows that the WD software wiped out the new disk's partitions, but it says "114 GB BAD". Do I have to do some kind of low level format on this thing now? I'll let it run for a few more hours, but if it hasn't done anything by bedtime I'll kill it and try to use PM to get a clean partition on it. Arrrrgh!

Arrrrrgh! So close and yet so far! I figured out why the WD tool was &(%&^#)ing up. Somehow between Lifeguard and PartitionMagic (and maybe the phase of the Moon), I ended up with the new disk having ONE 120GB partition, which PM listed as type "BAD" and wouldn't let me delete it. Lifeguard didn't show any partition, but couldn't add the new partitions (no space) and just sat there twiddling its binary thumbs while I waited. Nice programming, WD! Eventually I stumbled across something in PM that let me change the partition from BAD to NTFS, which I could then delete, and proceed with Lifeguard. Before, LG was offering to clone the disk and bring over all 6 or so partitions in one operation, but now it will only clone the boot partition (Win XP). OK, that's better than nothing. I did that, and then used PM to manually transfer over the other partitions. Now PM can deal with this, but BootMagic refuses to do its magic. So I uninstall PM and, uh, BM (did they think before they named that product? :-) ) and reinstall. Now BM complains that some kind of "DiskManager" configuration is preventing it from working. What is DiskManager? I don't see anything by that name, and nothing in any online Help. Anyway, I disconnected the old disk and was only able to boot to Linux on the new (via GRUB boot manager). I installed a new partition with a later Linux version and tried GRUB again. Now I can boot into either Linux, but still no Windows. OK, so I boot up with the PM rescue disks and try running PM. It says that the Windows partition is foobarred! I try running fdisk to set it as the active primary -- no soap. This process rearranges the partitions so that GRUB can't find anything. I tried fdisk /mbr but no joy. I'm going to have a nice stiff drink and tomorrow I'll rebuild the new disk -- again :-(. This time I'll try wasting one of my primary partitions on a BootMagic miniloader, as their instructions say to. Why did BM work fine for years on my old disk, and with same-size partitions on my new disk it suddently won't work? And what's this DiskManager thingy? Does anyone know how to repair my partitions before I go through all this work? I don't mind using GRUB instead of BM for selecting the boot. Frazzledly yours, Phil

Well, it was ugly, but I appear to be up and running on my new disk. The one without the fingernails-on-blackboard screech. The Windows XP partition got munged several times and had to be recopied using PartitionMagic. I never could get BootMagic to work -- apparently I should have uninstalled it before starting the process, but I wasn't expecting the drive letters to shift around. I'm multibooting using GRUB (from Linux), and apart from a dreary looking selection screen, it's fine. The PC's sound wouldn't work for Windows (worked fine for Linux), and I found that the volume controls and mutes had gotten all bollixed up in the process! I think I cleaned up all the broken .lnk files that encoded the old disk assignments, but it would be nice to know if there are any tools to ease the task. Even better, a way to keep Windows from reassigning drive letters all over the place, or change them back once this has happened. Next up: let's see if Windows claims this is now a bogus copy (get new key). Nothing yet, but I haven't tried doing a Windows Update. jam and per, thanks for the suggestions, even though the disk drive (Western Digital) software and Ghost proved to be useless here.