Disk cloning tool

[killie99]

What's the best free disk cloning tool to use?

I want to replace the hard drive in my laptop with a bigger capacity one so ideally I'd like to pop the new drive in a USB caddy, plug it in, run a disk clone (there are 3 partitions on the current disk) and magically get all 3 partitions created on the new drive. When the cloning process is complete I want to remove my current hard drive, insert new hard drive, switch on laptop and everything is there and working just as before - is this possible for free?

OS is windows 7 64 bit incase that is important.

[CaptainCrash]

Owners of Seagate and Western Digital HDDs can download and use free cut-down versions of Acronis True Image (called Seagate DiscWizard and Acronis TI WD Edition) from their respective websites.

Or you could go with Macrium Reflect Free, which has always worked well for me, or Clonezilla if you're not bothered by the lack of a fancy GUI.

[killie99]

I came across Easeus Disk Copy while googling, and it appears to do what I want. It's currently running and will complete in 3h 35m , gulp! 80GB copied, 218GB still to go ....

[spoon_]

If you're able to prepare the hard drive beforehand, ImageX is good.

[chadders]

For a simple HDD replace can't you use built in Windows 7 image/restore?

[killie99]

For a simple HDD replace can't you use built in Windows 7 image/restore?

does that do multiple partitions? I was under the impresion it didn't.

Just had a quick read up on the Win 7 tool. Looks like it creates a compressed image that you can then restore rather than being able to just stick the cloned disk into your system.

[bledd]

Macrium free

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp

[OilSheikh]

I also suggest using Macrium Reflect.

Macrium will take a snapshot of your full hard drive and create an image file that you can store on another drive.

Then, pop your new HDD in and use the Macrium Rescue CD to point to the image file.

Any extra space resulting from your bigger HDD will need to be reclaimed as a separate partition from Windows Administrative tools.

[watercooled]

It's not the fastest way as it copies at the block level i.e. copies the lot, even empty space, but dd is a simple way to do it. Given sda is old HDD, and sdb is new one:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=1M

You can do this from a LiveCD, just be very sure you know which drive is which, you can use fdisk -l to list partitions currently on any connected drives. Reversing the order will clone the blank drive to the old one, overwriting anything on it. But you have backups anyway, right?
After cloning, you will have a big chunk of empty space so you can either create another partition or expand an existing one with something like GParted. You can expand any partitions but you're more likely to have problems with any but the last partition on the drive and expanding any before that would involve moving other partitions, plus moving partitions is slow.

[mightymouse]

i did mine exactly the same scenario with w7 backup/restore. works fine but make sure you defrag after cuz it was sluggish on mine

[watercooled]

What did you use?

[bledd]

Any extra space resulting from your bigger HDD will need to be reclaimed as a separate partition from Windows Administrative tools.

You can use Disk Management in Windows to expand the current partition to use that space too mind

[OilSheikh]

You can use Disk Management in Windows to expand the current partition to use that space too mind

How do you do that bledd ?

[Jonj1611]

How do you do that bledd ?

Start > Control Panel > Adminstrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management(under storage).

Then just right click on the free space, it should say unallocated or something like that, and format the partition which will add a drive letter at the same time.

[watercooled]

I think he means how do you expand a partition. Go to Disk Management, right click on the last partition and click Extend Volume. You might not be able to do it on a mounted partition and almost certainly not on C:. As I think I said earlier, extending a partition other than the last one isn't recommended (or possible on Windows IIRC).

[leonkehoe]

CloneZilla's always worked for me!