Combine hard drives

J

jez86

Member
Hi everyone,

First post here, hope someone doesn't offering me some advice....

Currently I have a 20GB IDE drive with one partion (C:smile: which contains Vista. Also a 320GB SATA drive split into two partitions (D: and E:smile: which contain data.

What I would like to do is move Vista from the IDE drive to a new partition on the SATA drive, get rid of the IDE drive and have all 3 partitions on one disk.

Is this possible without a re-install?

I have found alot of threads about merging drives and partitions but I just want to move the partition from one drive to another and make sure it is bootable.

Any ideas on the best way to do this would be greatly appreciated.

Regards

Jez
 
First you will have to get Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost to Image your current install. From there you will have to partition the 320GB drive to give the Image someplace to go.

But then you will have to figure out if this will mess up the boot loader. Cause it might not be setup for the correct boot. Not to mention that the Image might not take on the SATA hard drive.

It can be done. But not without some headaces. It would be much easier for just a re-install.
 
And Acronis at that doesn't always write back the mbr properly from an image (at least not version 10 anyway) and you must have the space for each partition/disk in the image (ex: a 320gb partition image well require at least 320gb of the disk you wish to restore it to). You're best off taking an image of your files instead of an entire disk or partition and re-storing them later after the OS and your applications have been re-installed.
 
Thanks for the quick replies.

I will try and ghost an image an image on to a new partition which will be set as active, if that fails I will try running the Vista repair from installation dvd, and if none of that works hopefully just putting the IDE drive back in (with correct BIOS boot order) should still mean the computer is bootable.

Please let me know if you disagree, and I will post back my results if anyone else finds themselves in a similar situation.
 
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