Easiest Way To Create Hard Drive Image

[DBB2010]

so if i have room to store the image file i shouldnt compress it its not worth the risk?

that's my suggestion. in most cases you wouldn't get much space back anyway. plus if you had bad sectors on the drive or something in the future it could easily corrupt your entire backup image where as with no compression, you would only lose the data located on the damaged portion of the disk.

plus hard drives are cheaper now than they ever have been before in terms of cost vs storage size.

 

[Harper]

Why not use ghost (or what ever other drive cloning tool) to just clone the drive from your old drive to the new drive?

 

[iamloco724]

i dont have a spare bay right now to put the new drive in while the main drive is still in

 

[Trotter]

You don't need a bay to mount it. Just connect it and lay it on the anti-static bag for the time being. As long as you're not banging it around or laying it on bare metal you'll be fine.

 

[iamloco724]

guess i could do something like that..is cloning better the creating an image..?

 

[drougier]

guess i could do something like that..is cloning better the creating an image..?

Just connect your new drive, boot up your computer with a boot cd like Hiren's, MiniPE or directly a Ghost cd and then clone your entire drive (as Keyboard Cowboy said ), later you can retire your old hard drive...

 

[iamloco724]

one more question how long roughly would cloning a drive of my size take?

 

[DBB2010]

one more question how long roughly would cloning a drive of my size take?

not long at all. how much data do you have?

 

[iamloco724]

around 170gig

 

[Fazza]

To clone a drive disk-to-disk using Ghost your talking a matter of a few hours but it all depends on the bus speed of your motherboard, amount of RAM installed and whether you're using the latest version of Ghost for example.

I would estimate around 3 hours.