Cloning windows vista

[Leary22]

i having trouble cloning windows vista with Nortons ghost 2003, the setup is i have a start up disk drive 1 - Window Vista Hard drive and a third drive connected that i want to clone Vista onto. Off the start up drive i have the OS XP Professional with nortons ghost installed on it, i select the right source drive and the right destination drive... and after restarting to run the program it has an error... can i get a few pointers.

[PrntRhd]

Does not support Vista?
http://shopping.yahoo.com/p:Symantec%20Norton%20Ghost%202003%20Software:1990 914529:page=details

Ghost 11,12,13,14 support Vista
Version 14 no longer supports older versions of Windows, only XP and Vista.

[Leary22]

ok so you are saying that i need ghost 11 or 12 or 13 or 14 ? ... cause when i am running ghost the bootable or start up hard drive has xp professional... and the thing that i am trying to do is clone vista from two other drives that i have hooked up to the bootable or startup hard disk with xp. Now the extra drives that i have hooked up i will call drive D: and drive E: ... on the drive D: it has Vista installed on it ... Drive E: is a formated hard drive that has been partitioned.....so i am cloning D drive to E drive .... and you are saying that i need to use ghost 11 or higher in order to do this ... cause wit4h norton 2003 it is just not working for me.

[PrntRhd]

I am saying Norton had to change the software to support Vista. The Ghost 2003 version supports OS up to and including XP.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Ghost

[Paul Komski]

There are at least three good and cheap/free ways to clone one drive to another. I personally dont like ghost because it can involve itself with the file system and it is also an expensive bloat. None of the following care what operating system or file system is use because they basically simply copy block data; some can also do a resizing operation on the partitions if requested.


Copy/Wipe from www.terabyteunlimited.com
Use the hard drive manufacturer's own cloning utility.
Simply use dd from Linux (eg a Knoppix live CD).


Post back if you need any clarification or if you just want to clone partitions and/or the MBR.

PS I personally stay away for doing any cloning from within windows. I always suggest to do it from a floppy or CD or from another PC.

[Leary22]

Thanks i got it done by using the hard drives manufacturer own cloning utillity ,, now another problem i am have maybe simple cause i am over thinking it but ... what is the easiest simplest way to burn a Image to a CD\DVD ... i down loaded the Windows Automated Installation Kit or WAIK ,, and the file came as an vista_6000.16386.061101-2205-LRMAIK_EN.img file... just wondering how to do this the right way.

[Paul Komski]

what is the easiest simplest way to burn a Image to a CD\DVD
That depends whether the optical disk needs to be bootable or not and what made the image in the first place. As far as getting a file or files to a CD it is no different than burning any file or files as data to a disk - as long as the file will fit on the disk of course - though there are ways to split files and to span disks.

If you want to image partitions directly to CD/DVD I like ImageForDOS v1 (http://paulski.netfirms.com/zpages.php?id=1917) from a floppy or CD (once again because it avoids using the file system at all). The resulting CD should have a bootable version of IforD on it.