How does imaging works

[Messerschmitt]

I used Norton Ghost to create a disk image of my drive C.

My question is. can I use the same disk image the new SATA II HDD.

My current HDD is IDE and drive C has about 10GB. the new SATA HDD I want to partition it in 20GB for drive C and the rest drive E.

[IcemanND]

it depends. you need to have the sata controllers installed on the machine you took the image of otherwise they will not likely be seen in oder to boot when moved to the sata controller. Also if this is a different machine you will need to have the same or a compatible HAL on both machines.

[Messerschmitt]

It's totally different system and hardware.

I guess to image it has to have at least same HDD size and type?

[IcemanND]

the hard disk has to be big enough to hold the uncompressed image. The bigger issue is the controller the hard drive is attached to. If they are different then the new controller needs to be installed before moving the system or you will get a BSOD.

Also the HAL (hardware abstraction layer) needs to be compatible. If the machine you are going from is ACPI it should work on any of the ACPI systems, though you may lose some performance. If it is an ACPI Uniprocessor HAL it will work on an ACPI uni or ACPI multiprocessor HAL without an issue 99% of the time, but some finagling is required on most systems to go back to the standard ACPI. If you are starting with ACPI multiprocessor then finagling is required to go back to ACPI uni or standard ACPI, but going to another ACPI Multi should be no problem.

[spacesurfer]

HDD and Partition size doesn't matter with Ghost. You can image a 10 GB partition and restore that image to a 6 GB partition and it will work fine. I've done that plenty of times to the same system though.

You issue would be different hardware would cause problems and missing drivers such as AHCI drives.