How to clone a SATA hard disk?

[C.L. Wong]

You used the Promise RAID to clone the drive? 40 minutes for 80GB sounds
pretty good.

No, I used the onboard RAID supported by the VIA VT8237 southbridge
for the cloning. It supports RAID 0 and RAID 1, and seems to be fairly
easy to use. I did not try to clone using the Promise RAID.

Although it was a 80GB HDD, it was not full. There are about 43GB of
data in it, but even then, 40 minutes was quite fast. It was certainly
faster than using Ghost 2001 to clone similar-sized IDE drives.

 

[C.L. Wong]

Try connecting the 2nd HD as a secondary HD and use Disk Manager
on the primary HD to create another partition on the secondary HD that
is as large or larger than the primary HD and set the new partition to "active".
Then hook them both up in a RAID 1 configuration and try to do the
Duplicate procedure. It *might* use the 2nd partion on the 2nd HD.
Let us know the results.

To set a partition as "active":
rt-click MyComputer, click Manage/Disk Management
rt-click the new partition, click Mark Partition as Active

*TimDaniels*

Thanks for the tip, but I have already bought an identical 80GB SATA
HDD yesterday and managed to clone it using RAID 1 on the VIA VT8237
Southbridge SATA RAID connection. I don't have any immediate plans to
buy a larger SATA HDD, so I won't be able to try out the above
scenario.