Copying entire OS

[SilentAssasinooo]

Hi all, I've got two IDE hdd's and just installed a pci raid card so I now have a third, first sata hdd. I want to make the sata hdd my primary and copy all of my main hdd, with the OS and whatnot onto it, what can I do to accomplish this? I've tried to copy files but it says most are being used, will I have to use the backup ide hdd as a bootable and copy the contents from the main ide to the new main sata?

 

[SiMuLaCrUm]

You can use Ghost or something similar to copy the entire content of you main hdd onto a DVD and then you can put everything onto the SATA drive.

 

[SilentAssasinooo]

where might I find "Ghost"? When I try to backup files with nero it says some are in use though, how might I get around that?

 

[SiMuLaCrUm]

Norton sells it, but there are free alternatives out there that do the same thing.

 

[Matthew DeCarlo]

Check out HDClone, Partition Logic or Clonezilla. I believe all of them are free (or have free versions) and will do what you need.

 

[SilentAssasinooo]

I changed my mind I cna't get any of those progs to wok, I want to install mac osx onto the hdd on the raid card(sata) but mac wont recognize it when I try to install it from the cd.

 

[buccaneere]

Boot from a linux Live CD.

Open up a command line, execute as root user this code:

cp /dev/sda /dev/sdb

...where sda is the old disk, and sdb is the new one.

All data - files, executables, OS, everything, will duplicate. It will take 2 hours easy, with no progress indicator, until done.