Recently, I wrote about my hard drive crashing.  In fact, I am sure it was the last thing you heard from me.

I was able to get back up and running with a drive I salvaged out of an old HP laptop (circa 2001).  It hummed like a jet engine, but was sufficient until my new drive came in from Newegg.

So, what to do with all of the configured software on the jet engine drive?  Since I never had used Norton Ghost for drive copy before, I decided to give it a test run.  Previously, I’ve used Ghost images in a lab environment to reimage desktops after classes to ensure viruses, etc weren’t on there, and to start them out with a clean slate for the incoming class.

When the new drive came in from Newegg, I attempted to use Ghost 14 to do a direct drive copy to my USB attached hard drive with the blank hard drive from the hard drive in the laptop, humming like a jet engine.  First of all, Ghost still doesn’t recognize USB storage devices in recovery mode, which means I would have to do the hard drive copy within the operating system.  After I did the drive copy from within Windows, I switched the hard drive out.  Upon booting up, I got one of those nice “I/O error: cannot read drive” errors, or something to that effect.  Epic fail.  I really didn’t feel like figuring out why that was happening, and as an end user, I shouldn’t have to.

I took the Ghost disk out and frisbee’d it across the room (my backup copy of course).  I popped in MHDD and erased the hard drive from block 0 and restored the default MBR.

At this point, I popped in Helix, it mounted BOTH the internal drive, and USB hard drive upon startup.

After the LiveCD OS came online, I opened a command shell and ran the command:

“dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/hda”

20 minutes later, I booted out of Helix, and booted into Windows on the new hard drive.

Norton Ghost might be good for preimaging things and setting them aside, but for notebook drive to drive copy, it sucks.  And for free, Helix does the job just fine.

One word of advice for Symantec: Get with the program or ALL of your software will suck.  Oh wait, too late.