I am looking for an app that can transfer my existing system to another drive, but I have one issue.
Ghost wants to take the entire drive image, but all i want is the Windows, Program Files, and Documents and Settings folders to be moved.
Doing this from within Windows as just a copy from one drive to another gives me sharing violations.
Any help is greatly appreciated.
P.S. I am using NTFS, if that matters.
I use Ghost to image a blank Windows install and be sure to zip up the various folders I need before i re-install.
Like for example, My Documents and Favorites etc. You can save most of your program files this way too, but you would be losing alot of regitry entries that programs made unless these programs don't require one.
I have 2 drives on my system, the largest is Fat32 so I can use it from dos including Ghost and other utils such as flashing drives etc., and my main one is ntfs.
Maybe you would want to use GoldenHawke CD-R Win to backup these specific file to CD-R, it supports that I think. Use version 4.
Actually, no, and here's why:
I have over 30 gig's in my documents folders.
The hierarchy:
Home-
Documents
Emails
Library
Movies
Music
Pictures
Public
Sites
So, as you can see, it isn't as easy as compressing or burning my files.
Oh, and I have 2 drives, 40gigs each. 2 gigs available on one, 7 on the other.
Windows XP comes with a "settings and files transfer" Wizard. It will let you transfer your favorites, documents, etc from one computer to another. it will create a special compressed file that you can burn to CD or whatever and stick in your new computer and unload (using the wizard)
Originally posted by Duckie@Jan 4 2003, 05:23 PMI have over 30 gig's in my documents folders...
...Oh, and I have 2 drives, 40gigs each. 2 gigs available on one, 7 on the other.
I repeat
I had 10GB and i transfered it using the wizard, its kind of slow, but it works.
Also, are your documents and junk on a seperate partition (or just one)? Because if they are, you can use DrvimagerXP, which is free. It will take a partition, compress it and let you uncompress it (byte for byte) in another place. The same people also do Drvcloner, which will transfer a partition directly to another drive (or partition)
ill look around for another program though, i need one also.
OK.
First thing, when you finally get a solution for this situation and back your files completely off of you primary boot drive do this:
Partition the drive so it has a 5GB Primary NTFS/Fat32 (Your Choice) Partition.
Then setup Windows as you usually do.
In Windows use Disk Manager to create the extended partition using NTFS, because not only is it faster but is more readily supported and typically has less errors. (Faster too with good security)
Now you have 3 drives, and you can use your extra partition to use the space afforded by your drive without having the limitation of losing all your data when you need to format and start fresh.
If you use any of the Windows folders alot, you can simple create aliases to new folders and these will show up within the folder you usually save documents in making it simple to "redirect" any saving of files.
As for your current situation, I could suggest that you use a File Archiver set to "store only, no compression" to simply archive folder contents as a read-only operation to a dump file on the new disk.
It will take a while for some of the folders but it should not generate any errors.
I have done this before, just be sure to get to the root of the folders, don't just copy a whole user account folder, you need to dig in and locate the actual folders within the user account you wish to archive to the other disk.
As for program files directory, a plain read-only archiving to a zip/rar file should not set off any Windows Alarm Bells....I am using WinRar right now to dump the contents of my Program Files Folder in Windows XP to my D: drive as a uncompressed file...we'll see if any errors show....and I am under an Admin User Account. It says it will take aprox 1:20:90 so I am gonna take a snooze for an hour and it should be done. ;-) oh now it says only half hour.. maybe I will stay.....staying..going..staying..going..ahhhh.. 
Ok it is done and only 3 small errors were reported:
! D:\Program Files.rar: Cannot open C:\Program Files\QCD 3\CDDB\cddb.dsThe process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.
! D:\Program Files.rar: Cannot open C:\Program Files\QCD 3\CDDB\D0000000.FCS
The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.
! D:\Program Files.rar: Cannot open C:\Program Files\QCD 3\CDDB\L0000001.FCS
The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.
Other than that, the file was created and is a perfect snapshot with the exception of those files, which happen to be part of the Audio player I was using while I was compressing the folder. WinRAR displays the errors in a seperate window and does not stop an operation because of this error, but keeps going.
I right clicked Program Files folder and selected: "add to archive.." and then selected "store"as the compression type, on the Tab "Advanced" I selected to save file security (NTFS), under "Files" tab I selected to store full paths. And under the tab "Backup" i selected "Open Shared Files"
If you don't select "store" as the compression method, it will take a long time.....
I hope this helps you out Duckie.....I am using WinRAR version 2.9.
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