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Cloning a hard drive


vbrad511
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When you clone a hard drive you use a particular program to exactly copy the data on it. Suppose you were running out of room on your current drive and wanted a bigger one, but liked the stuff on yours....you'd install the program, hook the bigger drive to the computer, set the program to go, and it'd duplicate all of your data on the bigger drive. You then remove your small drive and put it away for safe keeping and run on your larger drive.
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Source is a WD, target is a Seagate. Ever had Ghost let you down? I've got a copy of Norton Utilities 2003 that's got Ghost. I've used it a few times, but did have a glitch once and lost a bunch of data.
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I use 11.5. I have not had any problems with it. I've never seen a "glitch". I've seen about every type of user error, but no faults in the program. I use this program at minimum once a day, usually 5-10 times a day. It looks like Seagate offers Diskwizard, but I have never used it so I cannot attest to its reliability/functionality. //edit: Diskwizard is Acronis. Edited by button
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  • 1 year later...
Just a thought... I bought a Canvio 1 TB drive (smaller than a pack of cigarettes) for $50 and used Macrium (free)to back up the whole drive. Now I can do anything I want..re-install, repair, get back deleted files or drivers and etc. Its fast and highly portable. It comes with the USB cable and needs no other power supply.I can do a full back up or use any portion of the files I want. Lost that serial number or etc..it's still on the Canvio. Acronis is very good..I used to use it but Macrium suits my needs and was free with free updates.
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hmmm.... you guys sound like you are coppying drives or backing up, not truly "cloning" a hard drive...

 

Cloning a hard drive to me = the drive will then have the same physical structure as well as it's hardware key, and be rehardware locked. If your just moving files your not really "cloning a drive"

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You are correct, but how many of us need a real clone? Very few. I can get anything I need including having a complete working replacement in minutes. It has all my settings, drivers, and all my keys. All of my apps work without modification. I used this because I had a particularly bad collection of viruses when my son used my computer for a month. Knowing it was going to be impossible for me alone to recover it all I had MS spend a total of over 24 bench hours (over several days) at level 3 support getting rid of all the problems. After that I came up with my recovery plan. It has worked extremely well. I see no need to spend all the time and effort doing doing an exact clone which would lock me into a specific hardware profile. Again this is just for my needs, not necessarily for everyone. I no longer work from a remote workstation. With USB sticks and portable drives I can carry data from home to either of my jobs without having to change anything on any of the machines. BTW my annual MS subscription was only $139 and they let me keep access to all the apps they used on the clean up (many were not MS apps). The long file name, non ascii, and infinite repetitive directory entry tools were very cool.
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Norton Ghost is what I use at work. We use it for complete hard drive failures in our CNC windows based systems. Hard drive suffers a catastrophic failure, grab a clean drive and write the image to it. Plug it in and it's just like nothing ever happened
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cloning may not be what you want to use I have done it a few times and the new drive was set up to the same specs as the old drive , like I tried to clone an 80 gig to a 250 gig , it worked fine but the

new drive was now an 80 gig ,I lost all the extra space

 

copy or move all files to the new hard drv seems to work better

 

oh I have never been able to get a WD hd to work with a sea gate drv , lucky I guess

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I see Macrium is no longer free. It was when I got it and I still get free updates. It can clone and is a very flexible program if you are running windows.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disk_cloning_software

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_disk_cloning_software

 

But like I said not many of us really need to clone or even care to keep the same hardware configuation. If I'm going to the effort to re-create a system I usually try to upgrade at the same time. Many time an OEM serial can be re-used if the hardware is similar like using the same chipset and etc. I have both OEM and retail OSes and seldom have any serious problems.

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 3 weeks later...
I use Acronis and it kicks a55. Does everything you need inclucidng dynamic resizing, so you don't have wasted empty partition space on the new bigger drive. It costs a couple bucks, but works everytime and besides cloning, it also can image your drive. Save an image to a file every month, and you can reload your machine in case anything bad happens or clone the machine to as many other drives as you want to. Never reload your OS manually again! If all you need to do is resize or set up partitions, even on a finished drive, I use G-Parted, Linux partitioning program that can make any type of partition.
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I use Acronis and it kicks a55. Does everything you need inclucidng dynamic resizing, so you don't have wasted empty partition space on the new bigger drive. It costs a couple bucks, but works everytime and besides cloning, it also can image your drive. Save an image to a file every month, and you can reload your machine in case anything bad happens or clone the machine to as many other drives as you want to. Never reload your OS manually again! If all you need to do is resize or set up partitions, even on a finished drive, I use G-Parted, Linux partitioning program that can make any type of partition.

 

Acronis free from WD is one of the best things ever. Have used it countless times over dozens of drives with no hassle.

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Acronis free from WD is one of the best things ever. Have used it countless times over dozens of drives with no hassle.

 

 

Yep, some OEM's bundle it with their products. I use a network storage drive and save my images there, Acronis can grab them off the NAS so no more buring DVD's or wrangling external HD's for images.

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