Drive image s'ware

Dyson

Dyson

Dyson

Soldato
Joined
18 Jan 2007
Posts
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Dorset
Looking at replacing one of my sata drives with a larger capacity one, and I was wondering if there is any good drive imaging software for vista 64?
 
i couldnt get that to work, even tried norton ghost, system would reboot and hang at a dos screen with the ghost/acronis boot options and wouldnt go further. even after restarting the pc it wouldnt go further. in the end i had to format and reinstall
 
I've used it many times to replace a HD with a bigger one and it's cloned the original with zero problems or issues!
I will be doing it agian soon as my 150gb Raptor is getting full quickly!
 
I've used various for the last 12 years and have used Acronis TrueImage for quite a while.

You can download a Trial version and satisfy yourself it will recognise all you HDD's etc including external units both when creating and restoring Images.
I assume you get full functionality with the 15 day Trial.

They've just released V11 so v10 can be bought for £15.

The later products can give better support for the latest hardware and although v11 has some problems it's working fine for me and Acronis will sort out the bugs sooner rather than later no doubt.

What I particularly like about it is that you can create incremental Images.
You can also restore Images without having to use a boot CD unless you wish to although this does mean it will overwrite your MBR but I've not had any problems in that respect.

You can check out the Support Forum - 'Wilders' - don't forget of course that Support Forums tend to be full of problems and not the happy customers.
 
So does this back up EVERYTHING on a drive? Drivers the lot? So, as some have said above, I could make an image of my drive put it on a new one and then then boot up windows as if it was the old drive?
 
Transferring the system to a new disk per Acronis - V8 - later versions will have at least this level of capability.

There are two transfer modes available: automatic and manual.

In the automatic mode, you will only have to take several simple actions to transfer all the data, including partitions, folders and files, to a newer disk, making it bootable if the original disk was bootable.

There will be only one difference between these disks – partitions on the newer disk will be larger.
Everything else, including the installed operating systems, data, disk labels, settings, software and everything else on the disk will remain the same.
Of course, this is the only result available in the automatic mode.
The program can only duplicate the original disk layout to the new one.
To obtain a different result, you will have to answer additional questions about cloning parameters.


The manual mode will provide more data transfer flexibility.

1. You will be able to select the method of partition and data transfer:

• as is
• new disk space is proportionally distributed between the old disk partitions
• new disk space is distributed manually

2. You will also be able to select operations to perform on the old disk:

• leave partitions (and data!) on the old disk
• remove all information from the old disk
• Create new partitions on the old disk (and remove all the older information)
Click to expand...

You can download the manual for various versions

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/download/docs/

Edit: I've never done this but I think the safest way would be as above ie copy the HDD to the new one and on completion remove the original HDD and the new one should boot up. I would NOT delete anything on the original HDD until you are confident the new one is OK.
If you then have problems swap the disks around again.
 
Last edited:
Massive Attack said:
alternativly if u dont want to pay for it you can download the lastest version of seagates disc wizard which will clone a drive for you, it is based on acronis but has some featurs missing, i only use the image thing so its all i need

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.j...toid=580a5e3ddbf60110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD
Click to expand...


DiskWizard is great bit of free software, (as already mentioned) it seems to be ATI 10 with a few unnecessary features removed.....the Maxtor version is called MaxBlast 5....;)
 
Like the seagates one i use Western digital tools one to copy stuff over from drive to drive. Works fine for me and i have a old drive as a back up drive now which i do every week.

I've tried ghost and that locks up on the pc dos screen and i had to reinstall windows again so i stay well away from that now!
 
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