Ghost Image?

Kanpai · 1 Mar 2011 at 15:31

I'm going to be moving my OS onto a new hard drive soon as was wondering if it is possible to make an image of my whole drive and installed applications/software and copy it onto a new drive? Can anyone recommend the best way to do if it is possible please.

Any help will be appreciated.

Thanks in advance

cochoc · 1 Mar 2011 at 15:53

I have tried this many times and always failed in the past. So I'd be interested in an answer/advice.

Swordfish · 1 Mar 2011 at 15:54

Fit new drive and clone it using Ghost or Acronis (Acronis is my choice).

Pandobear · 2 Mar 2011 at 00:11

Acronis True image is the way to go, thoguh I did use a free Linux based utility that worked ok too for basic drives, if there is any type of RAID involved then use acronis, as it loads all the windows drivers first

ewarwoowar · 2 Mar 2011 at 10:18

Or just use the windows system image software?

matthab · 2 Mar 2011 at 13:30

Id use Acronis as it is very feature rich and you get your money worth.

Ghost (Just the clone tool) is getting on abit and ive heard it doing some funny things cloning Win 7.

andicole0 · 3 Mar 2011 at 08:21

The tool provided by Intel for their SSD migration is based on Acronis. Seems to be freely available from their web site.

Andi.

lurkio · 3 Mar 2011 at 08:43

BEWARE ACRONIS if you are using an SSD
The software is unaware of partition alignment

deadite66 · 3 Mar 2011 at 09:07

yeah i've been reading that on their forums, when i get my ssd back from rma i'll try what was suggested there.
use the windows dvd to partition and format then stop it and use acronis to restore, then hopefully the the partitions will be aligned.

lurkio · 3 Mar 2011 at 10:37

Iam going to do some experimentation this week on this
I know that sometimes acronis deletes and re-creates the partition anyway when restoring so that method wont work all of the time

What I had to do was boot from my other windows partition
and format the SSD c drive partition
Load acronis boot disk and then use restore Files onto the partition
I windows I tried to restore the files onto the SSD C drive but it would not let me

Kanpai · 3 Mar 2011 at 12:25

Thanks for the help guys, will try Acronis!

andicole0 · 3 Mar 2011 at 12:53

lurkio said:
BEWARE ACRONIS if you are using an SSD
The software is unaware of partition alignment

The Intel tool which uses Acronis worked for me from a striped RAID set with two partitions to an SSD.

Admittedly the second partition is a system reserved one and I have no idea why it was on my original RAID set :-)

Andi.

lurkio · 3 Mar 2011 at 13:55

andicole0 said:
The Intel tool which uses Acronis worked for me from a striped RAID set with two partitions to an SSD.

Admittedly the second partition is a system reserved one and I have no idea why it was on my original RAID set

Andi.

I only have 2 partitions on mine gonna try a partial re-install to get it to create
the 100MB system partition , that way if I restore and as long as I dont
restore the 100MB partition as well then alignment will be fine