Heartland

OK. Here's what I want to do. plain and simple:

I have windows XP SP2.
I have a pc with a one physical disk as drive C with a 200 GB disk.

I want to clone disk C to an external enclosure 320 GB disk, attached
with a USB 2 cable to the main tower.

That is to say, once I've cloned it, I want to be able to unplug the external 320 GB,
set the jumpers the same as the internal 200 GB disk,
unlpug the 200 GB disk and replace it with the (cloned) 320 GB inside the
tower, and boot off it to start the PC.

I've read a hole load of stuff about norton ghost 2003
and norton ghost 10 (I have both of these pieces of software)
...but most of what I've read is horror stories about unreliability,
hot imaging in windows going wrong, problems with DOS etc.

does anyone have a tried and tested techneque or software tool
they believe to be reliable, which would do the above task??
if so, please can they outline what you do?

Many thanks

I've set up enterprise PC images using Norton Ghost for over 1000 users on 4 separate occasions (different PC builds each time) over the past 6 odd years, and never had any issues aside from an earlier version not liking XP. This cloning method is in production in my workplace, it works and works well.

If anything, your biggest problem is most likely going to be getting USB DOS drivers working. Putting the 320 into your PC and cloning directly to that would probably work, bypassing the whole USB thing.

I've used a really old version of Norton Ghost (if fit on a floppy) and it worked a treat. The only problem is it refuses to clone the disk if the destination disc is smaller than the source, even if the source disc isn't full and the contents would fit easily. It was a few years ago and I was cloning a 4gb disc onto an 8gb one (Win98) and it worked just fine. I unplugged a cdrom drive and plugged the 8gb disc into there (didn't have to change a setting, but I think XP is more fussy than win98) and cloned to it, then plugged the cdrom back in and switched the hd's and voila!, it booted first time with no problems.

Weekend research revealed:

Ghost 10 will clone your drive in Windows,
but this is unreliable. 2 of my 4 backups
didn't boot properly, even when the backup
apparently completed sucessfully.

Ghost 2003 disk copy, using a DOS based floppy disk,
DID work successfully, although I had to
connect the backup drive using the IDE connection
(2 hours of trying to get the external USB
recognised by ghost 2003 didn't achieve anything.)

It looks like USB support is very flakey in ghost 2003.

It seems odd that so many hard drives in
USB 2 enclosures get sold these days, but

1. disk clone software support is so poor
2. No official version of MS Windows can boot from USB.

Will this be supported in Vista?