Hard drive cloning

[Nick F]

Quick question, now that I have everything installed and setup my OS the way I want whats the best software out there for cloning my current setup to one of my backup hard drives so the complete backup can be re-insstalled if anything ever goes wrong?

[Zak33]

Acronis 10 Home Edition.

Totally awesome

[Nick F]

Acronis 10 Home Edition.

Totally awesome

Cheers Zak, typed it into Google and got the HEXUS review as the first search result

[Agent]

Acron.....

Oh he beat me to it

[peterb]

Quick and dirty (and I happened to do this very operation last night)

Download a Linux live linux CD (I use Knoppix)

Connect the second drive to the computer

Boot off the CD

Identify the two hard drives - assume the one you are copying from is the master on channel one - that will be hda (talking ide here - you will need to check for SATA) and the drive you are copying to is the slave on channel 2 - that will be hdd.

The drive you are copying to should have more capacity than the contents of the drive you are copying from (obviously!)

Then in a terminal window or on a command line type

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdd

and go and have a cup of tea while it does it.

[hardflipman]

ghost is what i'd use...

[IAmATeaf]

Ghost is what I use too

[RoBe]

Acronis has worked fine for me numerous times, simple and easy to use

[mycarsavw]

Quick and dirty (and I happened to do this very operation last night)

Download a Linux live linux CD (I use Knoppix)

Connect the second drive to the computer

Boot off the CD

Identify the two hard drives - assume the one you are copying from is the master on channel one - that will be hda (talking ide here - you will need to check for SATA) and the drive you are copying to is the slave on channel 2 - that will be hdd.

The drive you are copying to should have more capacity than the contents of the drive you are copying from (obviously!)

Then in a terminal window or on a command line type

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdd

and go and have a cup of tea while it does it.

...making sure the drive to be written to has nothing of any importance on it at all.

I did this quite recently too. Free and easy

[2Cold Scorpio]

I used Ghost years back; I like it, especially since i could make image files of my hard drive to easier storage. I haven't used Acronis, I might give it a spin on my new build...

[gss03]

Acronis is excellent.

Very much a ronseal product :-)

[pendulum666]

Ive used Ghost but it gets tedious when things go wrong. Acronis is better for me.

[Giraffe]

If you have a Maxtor or Seagate HD (only 1 of the 2 need be), you can get Seagate Disk Tools for nothing. Basically a limited version of Acronis, I use it (3 HDs, 1 is Maxtor, so I have to get the order of copying correct), it copies the drive and then you can just swap drives.

[JIM_BOB7813]

If you have a Maxtor or Seagate HD (only 1 of the 2 need be), you can get Seagate Disk Tools for nothing. Basically a limited version of Acronis, I use it (3 HDs, 1 is Maxtor, so I have to get the order of copying correct), it copies the drive and then you can just swap drives.

Yeah but its not guaranteed to work. I have a Seagate 7200.10 but my (BI)OS recognises it as a SCSI drive which makes the Disk Tools complain.

One i've been meaning to try is PING (Partimage Is Not Ghost)

[Giraffe]

PING looks interesting for making an image to restore and, being bootable, means that all of C:\ would be available. However, is the resulting copy actually bootable?

I've been cloning my HDD (3xNTFS, 1xFAT32, 2xEXT3 and 1 Linux Swap) and it is exactly as the original setup.
The disks are only 80GB and the partitions are around 7-GB (2 are small), so the whole thing takes about 30 mins. via USB or 20 if to an internal drive.

I see cloning as the next step up from backup, as it doesn't rely on the original HDD being good.

[EtheAv8r]

If you want Acronis 10 (latest build) then I have a legit copy I don't use and you can have cheap......... I use Shadow Protect - it is quite a bit quicker.