Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion

How to clone large HDDs?

<< < (2/5) > >>

lanux128:
i use XXCLONE (Freeware, for personal use) most of the time.. it is a product of Pixelab (the makers of XXCopy) & even works in Windows mode..

        * Makes a self-bootable clone of Windows system disk.
        * Supports all 32-bit Windows (95, 98, ME, NT4, 2000, XP).
        * Can restore the self-bootability in many cases. It takes only a minute to run.
        * The Pro version is ideal for daily backup.
        * Supports common internal disk drives (IDE, SATA, SCSI).
        * Supports external USB/FIREWIRE drives (good for a laptop).
        * Competes with Norton Ghost, DriveImage, MaxBlast.
        * Much faster than any of them in typical daily backup.
        * Need not go to the DOS mode.   Operates in regular Windows environment.
        * Simple to use by novices.   IT professionals think it's great.

--- End quote ---

patthecat:

TeraByte Unlimited (http://www.bootitng.com) offers CopyWipe as free software.  This just performs whole drive copying to another or whole drive wiping to "shred" data so it is unrecoverable.  It comes in DOS or Windows version.

For copying options you can: 1. Scale size proportionally from the original to the larger drive; 2. Straight copy of used sectors; 3. Raw copy of both used and unused sectors.

A users manual is available so you can read about its features before downloading CopyWipe.  The manual also shows how to make a bootable disk / cd with CopyWipe on it.

I use BootItNG and Image for Windows also from TeraByte Unlimited for my imaging/cloning needs (paid version).  The company has a very active and knowledgeable technical forum.  The interface for their products may not be pretty but they get to the point, albeit technically oriented, does its job very well, and is not bloated with extra "features".

patrick

f0dder:
If the drives are the same size, simply booting from a linux livecd and doing dd if=/dev/HDx of=/dev/HDy should do the trick (setting a largeish blocksize is probably a good idea, though). If cloning to a larger disk, it's probably a good idea to use some dedicated tool...

MerleOne:
Also have a look at Drive Snapshot, http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/, which allows for this kind of cloning.  There is a 30 fully functionnal version available, you can always try.

Snapshot has the unique ability to be able to exclude files/directory from the saved image, handy if you have a lot of multimedia files you want to backup separately or transfer elsewhere, while retaining the structure of your original HDD.  At restore, excluded files are created, but only contain zeros.

The differential mode of snapshot is also extremely powerful.

Last benefit : it doesn't require an install, the executable is 190 kB large and fully functionnal.

PPLandry:
My Acer laptop HD (5 years old, IDE 40GB) is showing signs of wear. It seems to have problems reading some areas of the disk and gives me a "blue" screen followed with a major crash, at times. I have an 80GB IDE portable drive which I could swap (2 years old).

I'm considering using XXClone. Is this still a good choice? It won't strickly speaking make an image, but simply copy all files and make it bootable, optionally copy the Disk ID. Will that guarantee that the end result will work when I install that 80GB HD into my portable? Fully configured for all my 100's of applications?

Should I go with a true image software?

The fact that some areas are not readable, will that cause problems with XXClone?

Thanks for helping a "software" guy with this hardware question.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page