Ok, in about a week, I'm going to have a new computer. Now, what would make my life a hellova lot easier, would be if I could very simply take the harddrive I'm using now, and duplicate it's contents onto the new drive. I think this is possible. No?

The next real big question, is how does one do such a thing? It'd be very nice to be able to just slave the new harddrive in and copy it directly. Is there a way I can stick an OS on this drive and mirror the major contents? Or would everything have to be coppied over, including the OS?

The main reason behind this is that I have LOADS of crap to move over to the new machine. Not to mention programs to install. Without a DVD burner, this makes the process of backups not fun at all. Not to mention the amount of programs I'd have to reinstall and reconfigure. I'm looking for an easy way out of this, and I need to know more about mirroring than I do right now. Any and all help would be appreciated.

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Put me in the hospital for nerves and then they had to commit me,
You told them all I was crazy,
They cut off my legs now I'm an amputee, God damn you.
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Frogblast the Vent-Core!

It's better to just start over because of potential hardware conflicts form your new comp anyway IMO.

True. I hadn't considered that at all. Damn.

Looks like I'll be spending quite a bit of time moving items across my LAN next week...

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Put me in the hospital for nerves and then they had to commit me,
You told them all I was crazy,
They cut off my legs now I'm an amputee, God damn you.
============
Frogblast the Vent-Core!

Just hooking up your old hard drive as a slave is more than enough. The hard drive format should be the same as the new hard drive (i.e. if old is FAT32, the new must be FAT32). The OS should be the same too (I think the version doesn't matter though). When your new computer loads, it should configure the old hard drive like a partition and you can just drag files from that hard drive to the other like you were just moving around files on a single drive. If for some reason Windows can't read the hard drive, you can try to boot the system into DOS mode with a bootdisk and transfer stuff over using the DOS prompt.

I should also note that an OS installed on a slave drive is ignored so you don't have to worry about the OS loading on the slave drive.

-- SavageX

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"...and if you don't like that, then you need to be slugged in the face repeatedly, until my hands are soaked in blood. Have a nice day!"
http://geocities.com/savagex378

[This message has been edited by SavageX378 (edited July 23, 2004).]