Hard Drive image,clone, copy or whatever

[MackemX]

SMART is reporting that my mates XP Hard Drive has an error and should be backed up and replaced. I know there are programs like Norton Ghost etc but I want to know what people have use and what they'd recommend

can anyone suggest a program that basically lets me select the source and destination drives and do the business? I was just going to put the original drive and it's replacement into another PC so they are not being used . I'd prefer to do it this way rather than use my mate's PC running his XP and then install an imaging program on his PC

It's been a few years since I did it on my own PC so I thought I'd just check first

[Soopafresh]

http://www.miray.de/products/sat.hdclone.html#free <--this works great, BUT the new hard drive MUST be larger in size than the old one (the one he has in his system currently)

http://www.runtime.org/dixml.htm

Better do it sooner than later...

And do a full defrag on your friend's new drive before you install it back on his system. It'll be one of the few times that EVERY file will be closed

[Bjs]

You have two choice's .

1:

Commercial ... but they may not work ... I personally use drive image made by powerquest , but symantec also reports the same program name as version 7 ... maybe they bought it out .

2: Freeware

There is the ultimate boot cd containg much of the hard drive manufacturer's tool's for cloning drive's ... though you would want to pre-partition and format the new drive to the same format as the drive with the issue before hand .

The tool's are capable of "cross" compatibility ... this is to say you can use the samsung tool's to transfer the data from a western digital to a new samsung ... all the tool's from all manufacturer's can do this provided atleast one drive is actually their's .

Download the iso from http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html (140mbs)

Burn iso image using imgburn .

Setup bios to boot from cdrom only prior to imaging .

The only issue will be getting those lame jumper's setup correctly so you can have all the drive's picked up from boot .

Recommend you setup failing hd on ide0 , and the new hd + cd/dvd drive on hd1 ... it will help with the transfer and prevent bottle neck during the transfer of data .

I've been here before , and it can be a pain in the butt .

Beware of commercial program's such as those from quicken , such as quick pos ... these thing's will deactivate due to the serial identity of the new hard drive having been changed , and require's phoning quicken during the hour's of 9am to 5pm , monday to friday only ... bloody idiots ... this is not very helpfull when running a business 24/7 ... ahole's .

--------------

I think the new ultimate boot cd also include's gdisk , or some form of drive imaging tool to image file ... an image file save's your bacon everytime when this happen's or worse , and your up and running very shortly as though nothing happened .

[Soopafresh]

"Beware of commercial program's such as those from quicken , such as quick pos ... these thing's will deactivate due to the serial identity of the new hard drive having been changed , and require's phoning quicken during the hour's of 9am to 5pm , monday to friday only ... bloody idiots ... this is not very helpfull when running a business 24/7 ... ahole's . "

Really good point. Mental note to self....

[MackemX]

@Soopafresh, thanks for the link to that program as it may come in handy. I just want to do a straight clone from the 'failing' drive onto the new drive

I guess I could use one of the programs on the UBCD (I'm sure I've got a CD already somewhere)

the original drive is a Maxtor and the new one is a Samsung. Seeing as I've already downloaded and burnt Maxblast/PowerBlast ISO's I've just checked the Maxblast page and it mentions this so I guess I'll try that first

The copy feature lets you make an exact duplicate of your existing hard drive.

thanks BJs for mentioning using the Manufacturer's tools . Thinking back now I'm sure that's how I upgraded my 80GB Maxtor to a 300GB Maxtor ages ago

[Bjs]

You should have heard the abuse I gave them ... we had customer's waiting for over an hour on monday as the system went down saturday ... we were able to use the pos terminal's on their own ... while they sorted out the bs , as we had to shut down the office server and remap the drives over the network to the pos terminal's ... and several restarts before it was backup and running before the data could be backed up from the previous day's sale's to the server .

Manually entering huge amount's of data by hand is a pain in the a### .

Good it prevents piracy of the product , but no programmer would , or should include this feature ... a bios , motherboard serial lock yes , but to hard drive ... how insane , and yet rude at the same time .

A note too all programmer's ... you might have a brain , but think first ...

[MackemX]

You should have heard the abuse I gave them ... we had customer's waiting for over an hour on monday as the system went down saturday ... we were able to use the pos terminal's on their own ... while they sorted out the bs , as we had to shut down the office server and remap the drives over the network to the pos terminal's ... and several restarts before it was backup and running before the data could be backed up from the previous day's sale's to the server .

Manually entering huge amount's of data by hand is a pain in the a### .

Good it prevents piracy of the product , but no programmer would , or should include this feature ... a bios , motherboard serial lock yes , but to hard drive ... how insane , and yet rude at the same time .

A note too all programmer's ... you might have a brain , but think first ...

yeah I'm aware of things like that but I don't think he's got anything that will use it. I haven't come across software that uses the actual Hard Drive serial (or whatever it would use) if that's what Quicken use. I set DVDStripper to use the VolumeID when generating a Hardware ID. Although a few complained about it, it was a small inconvenience people could live with but obviously in a business sense it will be different if people cannot use software instantly. I presume you'd need to know the ID before a drive failed if you wanted to use one of the programs that allow you to modify the Volume ID

[GKar]

To address just the cloning issue, if you buy a Maxtor for example, the Maxblast utility it comes with will allow you to clone to another hard disk, just boot with the Maxblast cd and go thru the menus.

[ahhaa]

just out of curiosity... if the drive to be copied has one of those D:SAV partitions, does the cloning go OK?

[GKar]

just out of curiosity... if the drive to be copied has one of those D:SAV partitions, does the cloning go OK?

If you are referring to Maxblast, I don't know, I never used the partition to partition copying feature.

[MackemX]

I had 3 partitions on an old drive and I still had them after cloning and I added an extra partition with the space I had left. I'm pretty sure I used Maxblast as it was between 2 Maxtor drives. It's been a few years but I recall that Norton Ghost seemed awkward to use as it would only allow me to one partition to clone

As I had tried to use Norton Ghost I formatted the new drive into 3 partitions of the sizes I wanted. I'm sure I then did the cloning with Maxblast and then created a 4th partition afterwards with the extra 120GB

I have just read this comment so I guess it's better you partition before cloning if you are using Maxblast . Obviously you could partition them first with Maxblast and then clone afterwards

Secondly, MaxBlast gives you options to set your partitions when you're formatting from scratch, but it didn't give me any options to set my partitions when I cloned my existing drive. It forces you to accept one partition that's the same size as your old drive, then creates a second partition for the remaining space. Not what I wanted.

[lantern]

I actually had to replace a faulty drive and used Acronis TrueImage. It worked great. Completely copied the the hard disk (which was the boot drive) with no problem.

[BobK]

I've used Acronis True Image for over 3 years and it works great.

[pepegot1]

Use Acronis. Go to their web site and get your questions answered in the forums, etc.

[Tonny]

I used Xclone a few month ago, freeware, works just fine. You can google Xclone to fine there web side.