Disk Clone

[peterhuang913]

I've installed WinXP on a 4gb HD. I've now dug up a 10gb one and was thinking of transferring the data in the 4gb on to the 10gb one. I've remembered that you can clone the drives and boot off the new one. Is this possible or do I have to reinstall? If so, which programs can do it the best, i don't care for cost. Thanks

 

[eyeCpc]

The most common heard name is Norton Ghost for this. One called Acronis looks better for a retail product. EAZCLONE is a freeware found at EAZCLONE free download: EAZCLONE is a very simple and effective hard drive imaging/cloning software. Multicasting in sixteen network cards;Create/restore partition image; create/restore disk image; check image; clone from disk to disk.

For drives that small a quick partition, format, and fresh install of Windows would insure the best results however. The files you want would copy fast by simply dragging folders from one explorer window to another or the copy/paste there. The cloned drive would make a good backup on removable media.

 

[peterhuang913]

if i clone the partitions itll boot off the new disk right?

 

[CalcProgrammer1]

I've heard you can also use the free GParted for partition cloning and resizing. Google GParted, it has a LiveCD and comes in some other Linux LiveCD's as well. Also, QTParted is pretty much the same thing, it or GParted is on the System Rescue CD which is great for PC recovery and stuff.

 

[eyeCpc]

GParted is more of a drive partitioning tool and can be downloaded for cd at SourceForge.net: Files

Gnome Partition Editor
GParted is the Gnome Partition Editor application. Before attempting to use it, here is some basic background information.

A hard disk is usually subdivided into one or more partitions. These partitions are normally not re-sizable (making one larger and the adjacent one smaller) The purpose of GParted is to allow the individual to take a hard disk and change the partition organization therein, while preserving the partition contents.

GParted is an industrial-strength package for creating, destroying, resizing, moving, checking and copying partitions, and the filesystems on them. This is useful for creating space for new operating systems, reorganizing disk usage, copying data residing on hard disks and mirroring one partition with another (disk imaging).

GParted uses GNU libparted to detect and manipulate devices and partitiontables.

Several (optional) "file system" tools provide support for file systems not included in libparted.
These optional packages will be detected at runtime and do not require a rebuild of GParted.

GParted is written in C++ and uses gtkmm for its Graphical User Interface (GUI). The general approach is to keep the Graphical User Interface as simple as possible. Every attempt was made to conform to the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines.

GParted comes under the terms of the General Public License GParted -- Welcome

Some screen shots on it can be looked over at GParted -- Screenshots

 

[superdave1984]

If you clone the drive from the HD in the PC you are going to use the cloned drive in, it will work fine. First boot you may get the "found new hardware" balloon.

 

[eyeCpc]

Sometimes that should work while at other times you might have to perform a repair install of Windows if problems are seen. Cloning works best when the second drive is identical not larger in size. Creating an image of all the important files and having a clean install of Windows still seems the best way there since these are not large capacity drives to start with.