I'm moving my daily driver to a new core 2 machine with Vista. I don't feel like the DVD or CD backup solution so I don't lose anything. Can I just copy the whole 80 Gb C: drive off my old P4 Extreme machine off to one of my external USB 250 Gb drives? I don't want it bootable, just stashed so I can pick and choose from the old C: - like My movies, My pictures, My music, etc. Is this doable? I don't know what Vista needs for a filesystem to read. It won't read my digital camera's SD card! "Want to format?" POS! John
Copy + paste? Vista will read any standard (windows) filesystem, format the external drive as NTFS and you should have no problem.
You could create an 'image' of the C:\ partition, if you wanted the whole thing But that would include things like the 'Windows' folder, the vast majority of which you obviously don't need. So I'd go along with the suggestion above, and just copy/paste all the files/data you want to keep, into a 'backups' folder on the external drive
i think while the concept is simple enough i very much doubt it will work that way at all in practice. be careful and selective over the data you need and put it on an external drive. much safer.
Use something like acronis true image and make a back up image of the whole c:, the only problem you may run into is being able to access some of the files due to permisions.
Using a program is a must to image the whole drive, otherwise you are trying to copy and paste things like the page file and what not.
