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easiest, simplest 'tard proof way of copying a hard drive

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krick:
If you're trying to move a windows 9x installation to a larger hard drive, you can connect the new drive alongside your old drive and then use XXCOPY to image the old drive contents to the new drive.  Detailed instructions are here...

http://www.xxcopy.com/xxcopy10.htm

Freeware XXCOPY download...
http://www.xxcopy.com/index.htm#download

zaphod:
Similar to krick's suggestion, I have used Western Digital's DataLifeGuard Tools for copying the drive to a new drive (or a partition on it).  Most recently I used to to image my stable cab drive to a second one in the box, then I unplugged the second drive completely but left it in the case.

wbassett:
Are you talking about just copying over your MAME stuff to a new drive or duplicating the entire drive... OS and everything?  If it's just the MAME directories and content that's pretty straight forward.

If it's the OS too, it gets a bit trickier but most drives you buy have utilities included that let you move to the bigger drive and then you just swap that with your old C: drive and you're golden!

Ghost will also work like a champ too, but if you can use a free utility why spend money on a program?

Now... if you plan on duplicating your entire drive, OS and all and then putting that into a different computer, you're going to run into some problems doing that.  XP will see there is all new hardware and won't like it.  You can change your drivers and get it to work, but in my experience it's never a clean system, at least not like a system formatted and where XP is installed on from scratch. 

severdhed:
Acronis True image is an awesome program...we use it at work all the time.  you'd basically get your PC set up exactly the way you want it, connect a second hard drive, and boot from the acronis CD, it will make an exact copy of your drive, you then just tuck that drive away for some day.  at any point you have a problem and you screw up your installation or configuration or anything, you can go through the same process in reverse and essentialy restore your computer back to the way it was when you cloned it.. and if you make alot of changes and you want them to be backed up, you can just do it again and overwrite the clone drive.

it works beautifully

AndyWarne:
Agree about Acronis. Its far better than Ghost which used to be OK but has become increasingly worse on each release. In fact I wont touch anything from Symantec.
Acronis has an option which I have not tried, which allows you to clone an entire disk installation onto another PC with different hardware and have it boot up normally (Universal Restore). This sounds almost too good to be true but judging by the quality of the base product should work. Anyone used this feature?

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