DL said:
You purchase a housing / kit and simply plug in to your usb port, whether
the kit has a usb cable depends on the kit.
Your existing IDE cables will probably be ok, but you would have to
eyeball to confirm
If you are going to use internal, disconnect this drive as soon as clone
is complete & dont reconnect until you want to use this driva as your boot
drive, in that case you would need to disconnect the origonal first.
Acronis True Image is your best bet and not the xcopy as proposed by
AndrewE
Whatever option you choose in a clone it is imperative you shutdown
immediately the operation has completed & remove your backup hd. Failure
to do so will mean your clone wont work as a boot disk when the occasion
arises.
ColTom2...
I would agree with DL that you not consider the DOS XCOPY command to
routinely clone the contents of one HDD to another HDD in order to establish
& maintain a comprehensive backup system now & in the future. There are so
many downsides to using that DOS command for disk-cloning purposes that it's
hardly worth discussing.
The Acronis program mentioned by DL is a fine program and worthy of your
consideration. A free trial version is available from
http://www.acronis.com
so you should avail yourself of the opportunity to using that program and
see how you like it.
We have worked with a fairly large number of disk-cloning programs over the
years. By far our favorite one is the Casper 4.0 program. It is quite simple
to use, relatively quick in operation and very effective. A trial version
(slightly crippled) is also available from its developer at
http://www.fssdev.com so you might want to take a look at that program as
well. And if you need more details about using that program I could furnish
such in a subsequent post.
A couple of other things...
1. Western Digital has a disk-copying utility freely available from its
website. Its main, if not exclusive, use is generally for a one-shot copy of
the contents of an old HDD to a new HDD. It's really not designed as a
routine, systematic disk-cloning type of program, although we know more than
one person who uses it for such.
2. You mention that you've already purchased another HDD that is "another
exact WD hard drive". Bear in mind (for the future if need be) that it is
unnecessary to use the same make/model for both your "source" drive and your
"destination" drive for disk-cloning operations. All that's really necessary
is that the disk capacity of the "destination" drive be sufficient to hold
the contents of your "source" drive. There's no reason why you couldn't use
a Hitachi, or Seagate, or Maxtor HDD as the "destination" drive.
3. As DL mentions you should consider a USB external enclosure to house your
new (destination) HDD. There's obviously an add'l safety factor when using
such an external device since it can be disconnected from the system
following the disk-cloning operation. While the USBEHD will not be bootable
under those circumstances, you can clone back its contents to an internal
HDD.
On the other hand we know of many users who use another internal HDD as the
recipient of the clone and rarely run into any problems simply because the
system contains two internal HDDs. But if the data is important or vital to
you it's best to use an external device as the recipient of the clone.
Incidentally, one of the very major advantages of the Casper program we've
mentioned is that should you use another internal HDD as the recipient of
the clone it is unnecessary to disconnect the cloned HDD following the
disk-cloning operation. Heretofore with other disk-cloning programs this has
been a real booting problem involving the cloned HDD when that drive was not
disconnected from the system following the disk-cloning operation. Naturally
there's no problem along these lines with any disk-cloning program when
using a USBEHD as the recipient of the clone.
Anna
