Cloning a hard drive

fetster · 16 Oct 2008 at 12:40

I would like to clone an IDE hard drive from another computer. I was going to remove the drive, plug it into an external enclosure and clone it (taking an exact copy of it) without affecting the drive.

What software would anyone recommend to do this?

Pdog · 16 Oct 2008 at 13:08

Acronis trueImage

You could plug it in to an external enclosure or into the PC itself and clone it.

pjansell · 16 Oct 2008 at 13:20

HDClone works quite well, it's free too - http://www.miray.de/products/sat.hdclone.html

hooneeawr · 16 Oct 2008 at 13:58

I used Acronis recently to clone (and resize) my Vista machine's boot drive. It didn't work very well though.

In the end I used this instead: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

pjansell · 16 Oct 2008 at 14:43

Why, what went wrong? I've used T/I and disk director quite a lot for exactly the same thing.

UKDTweak · 16 Oct 2008 at 14:46

As above or Norton Ghost.

fetster · 16 Oct 2008 at 15:01

thanks for the prompt replies. I'm about to buy Acronis True Image.

Flukester · 16 Oct 2008 at 15:46

one thing, not sure what your cloning for... but don't bank on plopping it into new PC and it booting, windows will prolly BSOD

lots of ways round this like windows repair and nifty tricks with PCI RAID cards to 'pre install' new HD controllers on new motherboard before swapping to onboard controller...