Now let's assume a few things:
that you have a cloning program already installed on your computer. I'll pretend it's Norton Ghost 2003 because that's the one I'm working with;
that you have a second hard drive on hand and you know it's large enough to hold all the data that's on your current hard drive(s); if it's a new drive, you've prepared it for use by partitioning and formatting it (not necessary on a drive that's already been in use);
you have carefully opened your computer case, you can identify your hard drive, its data cable with its unused center connector, and your hard drive power plug.
There are many different computer cases so yours may have a somewhat different layout than the one I have pictured below but all the drives will be close together.
You have two hard drive data cables, a Primary which accomodates two physical drives and a Secondary which also accomodates two physical drives.Usually, your CD/DVD will be connected to
the Secondary data cable.
Your current Master drive (source) will be connected to the end connector of the Primary data cable. If you have just one hard drive installed the second connector will be vacant.
If you have two hard drives installed, the second connector on the Primary cable will be connected to your Slave hard drive and your destination drive will have to connect to your Secondary data cable. You will have to temporarily disconnect your CD or DVD drive and use its connector. Right now let's work with the one installed hard drive that most home users have.
Due to space limitations I'm using some common abbreviations on the picture.
if you are using GO BACK or some other data restoration program, Ghost will ask you to disable it before cloning;
WARNING: this is how I clone my hard drives. I'm writing this because several people have asked
me how I do it and it's much easier to write the info once and post it for all to read. This is my method, it works for me. I can't guarantee it will work for you so proceed at your own risk.
After your jumpers are set and your Master data cable is in place, you can make your destination drive connections. Often the data cable is too short to reach the destination drive when it is not mounted in a drive bay; I don't want to mount mine because this is not a permanent drive installation. I'm going to clone to the destination drive, then disconnect it, so I lay a support on the bottom of the computer case (usually a thick book) and lay the drive on it. This raises the drive high enough for the cables to reach the connectors.
It's impossible for me to know the age of your computer and the kind of hard drive you have so you will have to figure how to set your hard drive jumpers yourself. On many drives, there is a small jumper diagram located on the drive label, which is found on top of the drive. If the diagram isn't there, you'll have to go to the drive manufacturers web site to get the jumper information (you'll need the drive model info located on the label). You will have to remove your source drive (carefully) from the computer and write down your drive model number and serial number. If there is a jumper diagram, draw it on paper and show all it's settings so you won't have to remove it again.
You will set your source drive jumper to Master and your destination drive jumper to Slave. If your drives have a setting called CS for Cable Select, set them both to CS and the computer knows which is Master and which is Slave by their position on the data cable. Any time you are going to change a drive's position on the cable you need to know that its jumper is set correctly. If you can use CS, you don't have that problem: just set it and forget it. I use a pair of tweezers to pull and place the jumpers.
Carefully push the data connector on to the drive pins. These pins can bend so keep the connector straight or you could bend a corner pin and when you try to straighten it, you may break it off. Remember to keep the red stripe or other marking on the data cable, facing the power plug - this marked edge of the data cable is pin 1. Some data cables are keyed so they will go only one way, but some are not.
Next, connect your power plugs and you should be all set to clone your drive.
If you are going to buy a new hard drive, I recommend that you purchase a name brand drive. I bought a 40Gb recertified white label drive for $46.00. It lasted a 4 weeks, then quit. I paid return postage and got a replacement. It lasted a 3 weeks. I junked it. A brand new Maxtor wouldn't cost any more than I spent on these 'bargains' plus return postage and I ended up with no drive at all (not worth investing in postage for another swap and that doesn't even consider all the time involved; also if I hadn't cloned my data, I would have lost it twice). Buy a name brand drive when you need a new one.
Before you attempt cloning, read my warning notice located on page C1, paragraph 1.
DUAL HARD DRIVES: If you are using only one hard drive in your computer it's not necessary to prepare your standby drive with more than one partition (C:) no matter how many logical drives your one hard drive contains. Ghost will make an identical copy of the entire drive including all your logical drives. But if you are using more than one hard drive in your computer, you will have to manually set up your partitions and logical drives on the standby drive because Ghost will clone only one physical drive to one physical drive at a time. You will have to clone each drive seperately to its proper destination.
For instance, if you have one physical drive C: and a second physical drive D:, Ghost will clone either of these drives to the standby drive; when you attempt to clone the other drive to the standby drive, Ghost will overwrite the partition you just cloned IF you have only one partition on the standby drive. So before you clone, make as many logical drives on the standby drive as you have on your two physical drives; in the example I used C: and D: drives. Then Ghost will clone each drive into the drive letter that you choose.
Also in the instance of using two physical drives, I simply remove the data cable from my CD-Drive which is connected to the Secondary data cable and connect the standby hard drive to it. There's no need to disturb the C: and D: drives which are connected to the Primary drive data cable.
(On my main computer, I'm now dual booting and cloning Win98SE and Ubuntu Linux, ext 3 file system. Ghost 2003 clones all of the drive successfully).
