Cloning a Hard Drive

[Gene E. Bloch]

I have a 320GB Western Digital Caviar Black hard drive that I would like
to clone to a 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black hard drive. I downloaded
the Acronis disk management software from the Western Digital Website
and started trying to clone the drive. The Acronis Disk Management
software showed the 143MB partition after the Windows 7 boot partition
on the from drive, as Unallocated space, and it was clear that it was
not going to copy it.

I went back to the Western Digital Website to get the Acronis user
manual, and the Acronis disk management software is only for Windows
2000, XP, and Vista. It is not listed as being for Windows 7, and not
surprisingly, it apparently does not know how to clone a Windows 7 drive.

Does anyone out there know a procedure for copying the boot partition,
and then using the install disk to recreate the boot manager? Or does
anyone know of any free download that can clone a Windows 7 boot
partition and end up with a bootable clone?

Thanks

OK, I've got my tuppence worth of opinion too.

I have had satisfactory experience with EASEUS Disk Copy, another free
program that runs from a bootable CD. You can also look at the resulting
clone, unlike what Clonezilla seems to say on the web site.

http://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/

For image backups, I'm happier with Macrium Reflect than with its
competitor Acronis. I use the paid version so I can get incremental and
version backups.

 

[Fishface]

Thip:

I've had mostly--but not perfect--luck with Macrium Reflect (free).

Why, what went wrong for you?

It seems like every time I run it there is an updated version that fixes something or
other. It's refreshing to see a company aggressively fixing bugs. Hear that, Adobe?

Now, in order to clone a disk with Reflect, you would need to back up the first disk
to a third and restore it to the new drive, correct? I suppose that works, but takes a
little longer. I just installed a Samsung F3 1TB in a friend's computer. It seems that
Samsung doesn't have a utility to clone the old drive. Since the existing drive was
a Maxtor, I first tried the MaxBlast 4 disk which came with the old drive. It kept
crashing after a while with an unnamed error, suggesting that I run scandisk, which
found no problems. I then downloaded MaxBlast 5 from the Seagate site and it worked
perfectly. It will only work if one of the drives is a Maxtor. It appears that Seagate has
a similar utility. I know that Western Digital has a Lifeguard Tools disk or something
which I tried recently, and it wouldn't even boot for me. That really rubbed me the
wrong way.

 

[K]

Suggestion: If you have more than one computer, look into using WHS
(Windows Home Server) as it will do exactly what you just said and much
more.
This is a really nice product!

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowshomeserver/default.mspx

Exactly, stick it a new HD, boot from a CD, and you can restore your PC to
any previous date (from backups created automatically by WHS)
K