Metropol

I used Norton Ghost to do exactly that. Took an age at USB1 speed but it worked.

yep, you're going to need a 3rd party disk imaging tool to do this.

there are loads products, i've used ghost (which is very robust) and acronis true image (again, very good) - true image is often given away on magazines for free so check your old cover disks (it was on pc pro or pc plus recently), but i think there is also a 15 day trial on the official site.

http://www.acronis.co.uk/homecomputing/ ... trueimage/

You beat me to it, Doctor.

Yes, Norton Ghost is the thing, but the Doctor's freebie would be a lot cheaper, knowing how overpriced (but excellent value, I'm sure) Symantec/Norton products are.

But use a network cable, rather than USB of either flavour. Much quicker that way, though not an instant operation even then, with all that data to shift.

Nick Harvey wrote:Yes, Norton Ghost is the thing.

But use a network cable, rather than USB of either flavour. Much quicker that way, though not an instant operation even then, with all that data to shift.

Indeed, my use of USB was born of necessity.

nodnirG kraM wrote:Thanks to all for the speedy replies. Once this temporary install is finished, I'll give Ghost a go. Incidentally, would it work with the three drives on respective SATA connections within the computer rather than USB or ethernet?

Yes, and that's probably the fastest way possible.

Ghost has a handy wizard along the lines of "clone my entire disc contents to a larger new hard drive" (something along those lines), which makes it very easy - for me anyway.

If you want a legit freebie, Knoppix contains PartImage which does a similar job.