Windows Can ghosting a drive lead to a buggy OS?

In dire need of input here, friends. The guys who put together my PC made the mistake of putting my OS on my new 200 gig drive, instead of the 2nd drive - an 80 gig drive it was meant to go on. Since I'm using this for machine for editing, I don't want my OS and video files to be on the same drive - but I definitely don't need a 200 gig drive for my OS and apps!

The techs are suggesting we just use Norton Ghost to clone the full drive, complete with Windows XP and a ton of software, onto the smaller one. Several musician friends of mine who do all of their work on PCs are swearing that they've had major buggy OS's after ghosting, and are urging me not to let the techs do this.

I'd love to hear some forum member's opinions on this, because I'm FREAKING OUT!

 

I ghost my personal drive all the time when I want to switch between stripe 0 configuration and regular 2 disk config.... I used to work for 3M and we ghosted every machine that came through the door (several hundred/year). Should work like a champ for ya. Just be sure to build a proper boot disk... dont allow ghost to modify your master boot record, then try to boot from the HD into it's own little dos mode... if it crashes, you have a busted MBR... I did this and had to use the XP recovery console to replace my MBR... I lucked out and saved everything, but it's still not a good risk to take... just make a standard 3.5" floppy boot disk... if you need more tools or something, then take said 3.5" disk and use it to create a bootable CD with your remaining tools... NEVER LET GHOST modify your existing MBR!!!

-TZ

 

I have used ghost to clone my hard drive from one drive to another on numerous occassions and have never encountered any problems

 

Don't worry about anything... it'll be ok

 

Its ribbish.

I use ghost almost everyday at work to setup new computers and have never heard of this problem.

 

I tried Ghost when I bought a new HDD recently, but every time I tried to copy Windows to the new drive, it would show the new drive as being only 40Gb's instead of 160. I used Acronis TrueImage instead (which also got better ratings from CNET, I might add), and it went smooth. I've been running it for about two months now, and I haven't had any problems with the OS at all.