So many great adventures start with this line.  I am just wrapping up my own.  The task was simple:  Upgrade the hard drive in my laptop.  I was going from 80GB to 320GB.  What’s so hard about that?  You use Ghost, you have it resize the partition to the max and go.

The First Attempt (5 hours, no success)

I borrowed a SATA “toaster” – a USB device that has a SATA dock in it and hooked it up to the laptop.  I booted a CD to Ghost.  The software recognized the internal drive and the external USB drive.  I took all the defaults.  When it started, my hopes sank as I saw the time remaining climb and climb.  Ok, so maybe copying 80GB over USB isn’t that great of an idea – I’ll accept blame for that.  That would’ve been tolerable except that the copy failed with a sector write error with 15 minutes to go.  Ok, back to work and we’ll pick this up later.

Attempts 2-5 (or more.)

This time I was a little smarter.  I pulled the internal drive from the laptop and used the SATA connectors in my desktop to copy between the two drives.  This completed the copy in only 40 minutes.  However, after installing the new drive in the laptop, the copy would never boot.  I tried each of the different options in Ghost, eventually giving up that I’d be able to extend the partition.  None of them worked.  The probable cause?  It’s an HP laptop and the drive has a stupid recovery partition.  Not only does it have the 5GB recovery partition, but also a tiny 2MB unknown partition that is ID 0, to start first.  When doing a partition copy, Ghost never copied it.  When doing a full sector copy, which should include it, the transition from the custom boot sector to the main partition never happened.

Stepping Back and Research

At this point, I’ve powered my desktop on and off more times that I have in over a year.  I’ve been swapping drives back and forth so I can use my desktop for research and then again use the CD for booting Ghost.  Somewhere along the way, I decided to buy another SATA cable ($20 from Best Buy and I still feel violated by it). 

I downloaded True Image and Disk Director and decided they wouldn’t do the job before even installing them.  I read up on the latest Ghost and it seems to be just some backup software now.  Then I hit upon Disk Copy from EaseUS.  It’s free and seems to be self-contained in a bootable CD.  A couple more reboots and downloads, including the very impressive ISO Recorder (also freeware) and I was ready to go.

The Final Snail (an inside joke)

Booting up to Disk Copy, I selected the sector copy option and let it run.  It was a little slower than Ghost – instead of 2.2GB/minute, it was 1.7GB/min.  That added an extra 10 minutes of time.  But it paid off, because the new drive booted!  I’m pleased enough now that I’m not concerned about resizing the original partition.  I’m just going to create a new partition to hold my 60GB databases and other large files.

So, in summary, the HP recovery partition makes cloning drives impossible using Ghost (version copyright 2003), but using Disk Copy from EaseUS was successful.  EaseUS also has a freeware partition manager, but I didn’t feel like trying it.

And the funny part about all this is that the laptop is going to be slicked as soon as Windows 7 is available on MSDN.