Advice About Cloning a Hard Drive

P

Pink Sparkle Girl

I want to clone my hard drive onto a new one (to be used within the same
machine) and wondered what the best program to use is?

I have tried Norton Ghost v9, but after trying it several times the clone
has never worked. What other choices are there?

Thanks!
 
J

JS

New drives usually come with a CD that has a set of utilities, one of which
may allow you to do a complete copy from the old to the new drive.

JS
 
J

Jim

1) Visit http://www.bootitng.com and download BootIt NG. Unzip the file and
execute BOOTITNG.EXE to create the bootable floppy or CD, your choice
(accept the defaults). Now shutdown the PC.

2) Assuming old HD is master on primary IDE controller (IDE1), move old HD
to slave on IDE1, or master on secondary IDE controller (IDE2). Install new
HD to master on IDE1 (replacing old HD). Be sure to get HD jumpers setup
correctly! Use cable select (CS) if unsure.

3) Now boot the BootIt NG floppy/CD. When the Welcome to Setup screen
appears, select Cancel (which aborts the install), follow the prompts, and
you will be taken to the BootIt NG desktop, now select the Partition Manager
(Work with Partitions).

4) Your new HD will be displayed by default (HD0). To see the contents of
the old HD, select HD1 (in the upper left corner). To clone HD1 to HD0,
select the first partition on HD1, hit Copy, switch to HD0, select the
freespace, and hit Paste. In all likelihood, you'll probably want to expand
the partition to take advantage of the increased drive capacity. Select the
newly cloned partition, hit Resize, choose a new size, then hit OK. Repeat
for each partition on HD1, in order.

5) At this point, although all the partitions on the old HD (HD1) have been
copied to the new HD (HD0), the new HD is NOT yet bootable, we'll correct
that now. Select HD0 from the upper left corner. Hit View MBR, and in the
dialog, you will notice four entries in the MBR (Master Boot Record). Each
entry w/ a non-zero address represents one of your cloned partitions.
Select the bootable partition (usually the first MBR entry), hit "Set
Active", and the partition will indicate Active status. Now hit "Std MBR",
this will initialize the boot loader in the MBR. Finally, hit Apply to save
the changes.

6) Hit Close, remove the BootIt NG floppy/CD, and hit Reboot. Your system
will now reboot as before but using the new HD. Before rebooting Windows,
you may wish to shutdown and remove the old HD (see notes below).
 
J

John

K

Keith Wheeler

I use Acronis True Image Home 9 and love it. Not only will it clone the
disks, it will also resize the partition(s) if the new disk is larger. Best
of all it makes a great backup program when your done cloning.

Good luck.
 
B

BobN

I want to clone my hard drive onto a new one (to be used within the same
machine) and wondered what the best program to use is?

I have tried Norton Ghost v9, but after trying it several times the clone
has never worked. What other choices are there?

Thanks!

If all you want to do is clone a drive, use the utility supplied by the HDD
manufacturer. If the utility did not come with the drive, download it from
the drive manufacturer website. There is no need to spend money just to
clone. I found that the WD utility was superior to TrueImage in telling me
what files were not transferred.
 
A

AJR

Follow BobN's advice - you should have received a CD (or floppy) with the
new drive - read the "manual" (instructions).
 

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