Connecting another SATA drive and back up my current drive?

My motherboard is K8T Neo2 Series ATX Mainboard and I am having 80 GB SATA Hard drive. There are 2 SATA ports (SATA1 and SATA2) and my current hard drive is connected to SATA2 port.
I want to backup my existing hard drive (mirror image) into a new SATA hard drive using Ghost or any other imaging application. So I can connect my new hard drive into SATA1 port and will it work? After connecting my new hard drive parallelly into SATA1 and booting windows from my old hard drive, will the new hard drive be recognised? Should I need to format my hard drive and then use Ghost application or directly I can use? Please do the needful.

Thanks.

Yes, a ghost/clone operation would allow the new disk to act exactly the same as the old one. The bit i don't understand is when you say 'After connecting my new hard drive parallelly into SATA1 and booting windows from my old hard drive, will the new hard drive be recognised?'

Why would you boot from the old windows? You've just copied it to the new drive?

No I mean before copying my old hard drive to new hard drive.
To explain more.. Just after I connect my new hard drive to SATA1 port and boot my windows from old hard drive, will the new hard drive be recognised? So I hope it gets recognised so that I can copy data from my old hard drive to new hard drive.

yes, your sata drive should be recognized. there shouldn't be anything extra you need to do. windows should already have the built-in drivers.

I think he is confused about what comes after plugging it in.
Once you have installed the drive and you boot into windows, the drive should appear in device manager (if it doesn't, there may be a driver issue or a hardware issue) but if it does, all that you have left to do is format it and create what ever partitions you want.


To format the drive, go to start - settings - control panel - administrative tools - computer management, and then scroll down to "disk management". Usually a window will pop up and will guide you through the set up process, and once you hit finish there you will see your new drive show up on the bottom window. There will be a black box next to it saying "unallocated space", right click on that, do format, follow the steps on the screen, and once you click finish it will format the drive (with the name and letter chosen on the guided list) and after a few minute the drive is formatted and should appear in your "my computer" section, ready to use.

I recommend making a single primary partition, even if your other hard drive has more than one partition. Most ghosting programs, as well as Vista's built in backup (if your running vista) can backup more than 1 partition to a single, provided there is enough space (combined used space, not free space).

You might also be interested in creating a RAID setup where both drives are mirror images of each other, so if one fails, it's all still running. Ghosting requires you to install a new drive, and reimage it. I personally would do RAID if they were both internal, whereas here on my laptop, I have an external hard drive, so I go with ghosting. Just some food for though, feel free to ignore RAID if it sounds too complicated / unnecessary.

Yeah your RAID setup is what I wanted.. I want my new drive to be a mirror image of my old hard drive. I just want to mirror image my new hard drive and then disconnect it and keep it in one safe place(my cupboard maybe )
So if in future I lose my old data due to some virus or drive failure then I can plug in my new drive and ready to use.
So how to do that RAID setup?

Thanks.

in order to use raid, you need raid hardware (well, there is software raid but i don't prefer it). sometimes you connect your hdds to a raid card and other times your motherboard may have onboard raid.

if you want to clone your hdd, you don't necessarily need raid. just use gparted. excellent ost on lifehacker on how to use gparted to clone your hdd.

I see.. And if I use Acronis imaging software and create an image of my old hard drive in new hard drive, will I be able to extract that image in the new hard drive so that I can boot windows from my new hard drive?

You want a clone, not an image. An image is where it takes a snapshot of your hard drive, and compresses it, and stores it all as one file. You can restore the image to a new hard drive (a 3rd, replacement for the lost first) but you can't boot directly to it.

If you use gparted like sandman mentioned (also if it's a maxtor, you can use maxblast) to make a clone of the original hard drive. Once cloned, you can do exactly like you want, disconnect it, store it somewhere safe. The clone is an exact bit for bit copy of the original hard dive, and can be booted from just like the original.

Just be sure to remove the clone once you make it, if you boot with both drives in, you'll have a conflict between the two, and whichever is primary will make changes to the secondary(rename the drive from C: etc). so just avoid that.

Why I cant boot directly from my new hard drive after I restore the image in the same hard drive? Its not possible to restore the image to only a different hard drive and not the same hard drive where the image is present.

Yes gparted seems great. But I got one doubt in it. I have one linux partition and 3 windows partitions(ntfs i think) in my old hard drive. So is it possible to copy all the partitions into the new hard drive? And after copying and disconnecting my old hard drive, I will be able to boot windows from my new hard drive without any problems? Like mbr will also be copied I guess right?