Need HD cloning advice.

[Seth]

Hey all.

I've never bothered with any cloning (imaging?) software before, but I'm going to be giving it a try.

I've got a 40 GB hd which has no errors, but is becoming very noisy. I want to image the contents onto another 40 Gb drive. To prepare the drives, I cleaned up and defraged the source drive, and formatted/chkdsk'd the destination drive.

1) Can I image directly to the destination drive?
2) How can a correct image be made if the volume is in use?
3) Is there a difference between ghosting, cloning, and imaging in this context?

Any tips you can give would be great.

Thanks.

[dbarrow]

You will need some type of program...
Most drive makers offer some type of bootable floppy that will clone from one to another, ie: Maxtor MaxBlast

Most versions of Acronis will enable you to clone one drive to another. You create the image first and then restore it to another drive using the Acronis boot cd.

[kern]

Hey all.

I've never bothered with any cloning (imaging?) software before, but I'm going to be giving it a try.

I've got a 40 GB hd which has no errors, but is becoming very noisy. I want to image the contents onto another 40 Gb drive. To prepare the drives, I cleaned up and defraged the source drive, and formatted/chkdsk'd the destination drive.

1) Can I image directly to the destination drive?
2) How can a correct image be made if the volume is in use?
3) Is there a difference between ghosting, cloning, and imaging in this context?

Any tips you can give would be great.

Thanks.

Seth,
You can use Max Blast from Maxtor, or Data Lifeguard from Western Digital to "clone" drives. cloning makes an identical copy of one drive on another drive. Boot from the MB or DL bootdisk, then select the option to "clone" entire drive.

[mylanta]

Seth,
Everyone has answered pretty well but I always suggest Acronis True Image rather than freebie programs nbecause there are other options. Drive to drive copying is one but you can also make a compressed image file and restor it to a new drive from a rescue cd environment...the ability to make image files to another drive or cd-dvd has to be of benefit to you to protect your data.

[Seth]

Thanks guys:smile:

It's 6 gigs of non-critical data, so I'll go with Maxblast.

I'll probably do it today or tomorrow and let ya' know how it went.

[Seth]

Well the documentaion on Maxblast says that at least one of the drives has to be a Maxtor. Since neither drive is a Maxtor, I used Acronis's "Migrate Easy". It worked perfectly:clap2:

Thanks again!

[Guest117]

If I had mucho data, I'd use Acronis.
But since I have less than 6GB, I use XXCopy to make a clone hard drive.
But I also have more time than money.;)