Partition Commander???

[W3MIV]

Anybody here use Partition Commander?

I am in the midst of replacing a HHD with a larger drive, and I wanted to move everything to the new drive without the tedious problem of reinstalling all of the programs. I used Partition Commander 11 to clone the drive onto a USB external drive and am now in the process of cloning that drive to the newly installed replacement drive. What a PITA this has turned out to be. It is taking forever. The process has been running now for nineteen hours and is just about half way.

[kf0rt]

I always use "larger drive" as an excuse to reinstall everything from scratch. I can usually have the thing serviceable in an afternoon.

[W3MIV]

I now regret not having bitten that bullet, but I have so many proprietary programs that require keys and serial numbers that I opted for the Partition Commander approach. I guess the problem is that, the new drive being formatted only and without any system at all, the copying process is being carried out through BIOS.

Live and learn. :roll:

[WØTKX]

I use it, but I always connect the drives with data cables. Never have used a USB drive for anything but a backup, or "traveling media". Using Partition Commander to help a local ham buddy recover from "the mouse stopped working, so I reinstalled Windows XP".

Reinstalling Windows is a PITA with the stoooooopid Gatway restore disks, and makes a HUGE mess of things. I helped him this summer with a very ugly virus, and now I'm the "go to guy".

Never ever EVER reinstall any Microsoft OS till somebody has a chance to check it.

He updated the mouse driver because a "driver update utility" told him to, even though it worked fine. This killed the mouse and he thought he could fix it by reinstalling Windows. That trick never works! Stopped him in time, and the data is still there... the drive won't boot till I mess with it.

Aaaargh?

[W3MIV]

Some of us seem born to do things the hard way. :(

I use it, but I always connect the drives with data cables. Never have used a USB drive for anything but a backup, or "traveling media". Using Partition Commander to help a local ham buddy recover from "the mouse stopped working, so I reinstalled Windows XP".

Reinstalling Windows is a PITA with the stoooooopid Gatway restore disks, and makes a HUGE mess of things. I helped him this summer with a very ugly virus, and now I'm the "go to guy".

Never ever EVER reinstall any Microsoft OS till somebody has a chance to check it.

He updated the mouse driver because a "driver update utility" told him to, even though it worked fine. This killed the mouse and he thought he could fix it by reinstalling Windows. That trick never works! Stopped him in time, and the data is still there... the drive won't boot till I mess with it.

Aaaargh?

[kf0rt]

My "routine" for many years now has been to use a new, bigger drive for the reinstall. The old drive immediately becomes a "backup" that remains untouched until I'm real sure I don't need anything it contains.

This usually happens when I need more space, but with big drives being real cheap, my boot/program drive is now 1TB and I don't keep any data on it. Ought to be good till it hits MTBF.

[KC2UGV]

Yeah, you would have been better off pulling the USB drive from it's cage, and mounting it in the PC. USB is sloooooow.

[WØTKX]

I've had this funny habit with Winders for years... either two partitions or two physical drives, the latter is preferred.

C: is bootup for Windows
D: is for all applications, data

Registry is backed up before every bootup, and I make an .ISO of the boot drive whenever appropriate.

That said, Windows 7 is a big improvement over the legacy Windows nonsense.

[kf0rt]

I don't do the registry or ISO the boot drive (probably should), but the C/D thing has been my religion for eons -- I install programs on the Windows drive though. Due to the registry these days, Windows and installed software are pretty inseparable anyway. Got a D:\Data directory that contains all my created data, and this is the only thing I back up. The data also directory contains ISO's of all installed software.

[W3MIV]

I have an older computer, and it has only two SATA sockets on the MB. One of them is to the DVD drive, the other to the HDD. I have not touched or altered the HDD that I removed to install the new one.

I originally considered disconnecting the DVD drive and hooking both HDDs to the MB and seeing if I could do a diskcopy of the old to the new. As any of you can probably tell, Bill Gates I am not. I figured that Windows would balk at a mere duplication and I might have more trouble than that with led me to this fiasco. I happened to have a copy of PC 11, so decided to use it since everything in their literature told me "cloning" one drive to another is a snap.

Guess Avanquest's idea of a "snap" is a little bit longer in duration than mine.

:(

The process is now a tad more than half complete, and I do not dare interrupt it for fear of having to start the process over.

:( :(

Fortunately, it is only one of a herd of computers here. Unfortunately, it is the shack computer. :( :( :(