Cloning a hdd

[k0409964]

Hi, i am just about to re-install windows on my dads comp, and he has a 500gig external hdd, he wants to clone his current internal hdd and put it all on the external so he does not lose anything!!

does anybody have any recommendations of programs to use??

thanks

[Guest]

I use Acronis True Image.

[foxyshadis]

If you don't want to buy Acronis (though I think it's great, simple and very robust, plus a good regular backup engine), there's a free tool that'll do the same: DriveImage XML. Used it a few times before I got True Image.

[Sharktooth]

google for rawcopy

[mr soft]

Maxblast is another good (free)one, if you have a Maxtor or Seagate HDD :)
I think this is seagates free version of Acronis.

[dragongodz]

a few free options you may want to have a look at

DriveImage XML
http://www.majorgeeks.com/DriveImage_XML_d4919.html

HDClone Free Edition
http://www.majorgeeks.com/HDClone_Free_Edition_d3809.html

SelfImage
http://www.majorgeeks.com/SelfImage_d5588.html

[reepa]

I just did this last Friday when I bought a new hard disk. I cloned the old 75GB disk to a new 200GB disk with Ghost 4 Linux Live-CD ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/g4l ) and then resized the NTFS partition from 75GB to 200GB with GPartEd Live-CD ( http://gparted.sourceforge.net/ ). Both are free, open source software.

Both hard disks are PATA so I connected them to the computer at the same time and used g4l's Click'n'Clone function. I'm not sure if it works with external drives though.

By the way, is there any downside to cloning a hard drive to another with different geometry? Does formatting a hard drive optimize it for its geometry which would be lost when cloning to a different drive?

[foxyshadis]

By the way, is there any downside to cloning a hard drive to another with different geometry? Does formatting a hard drive optimize it for its geometry which would be lost when cloning to a different drive?

Not anymore. Maybe advanced filesystems like ZFS, but the drives internally rearrange so much that it probably wouldn't do any good. The only issue you'd likely run into on NTFS is that the MFT might grow and fragment, some tools can fix or prevent that.

[k0409964]

thanks for the help guys, i will have a look at some of thos progs!

[Dr.Khron]

I'm was a long time Ghost user, but two years ago I switched to Acronis True image. Awesome program, worth every penny. My favorite feature is that backing up over a LAN works flawlessly (this is something that was pretty complicated with the old Ghost).

At the time that I bought it was way better then the free options available. However, I'm sure that that has changed since then, so please report back in if you find a free one that you really like.