Need to Clone a hard drive

S

Sneak

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 29, 2004
Messages
299
I bought a new Western Digital 2 terabyte drive to replace one that is a lot smaller. Need more storage. I need to clone the old drive to the new one. Same drive letter and all. Is there a good free ware program I can use to do that or do I need to buy a copy of Norton Ghost? Any help or advice would be appreciated.

I have Windows 7
 
Download clonezilla or aomei backupper or whatever freeware tool you prefer, even the freeware version Acronis provided by WD should work, but remember to clone using the bootable rescue disk never clone from within Windows or you'll end with a drive letter mess...
 
You can also download a Linux Live CD (my preference is Mint Linux) and use the "dd" command to clone it bit for bit.

The 2TB drive will then have a partition of 500GB or 1TB or whatever the source drive was. Just go into Computer Management in Windows and "Expand" the partition to take up the rest of the drive.

I have done this with SSD's a couple times.

This does require using a command prompt in Linux, which is not much different then DOS, but a lot of people...especially younger crowd are terrified of command prompt.

Also if you decide to use dd, it is silent and will not give any progress. But if you open another command prompt you can send a kill signal to get a progress update. In particular the following command will give you an update every 10 seconds.

After reporting the status, dd will resume copying. You can repeat the above kill command any time you want to see the interim statistics. Alternatively, you can use the watch command to execute kill at a set interval.
$ watch -n 10 kill -USR1 8789 <- that number will be different
Click to expand...

http://linuxcommando.blogspot.com/2008/06/show-progress-during-dd-copy.html
 
You don't need to buy a Norton Ghost.
There is a freeware called Aomei Backupper.
And it meet your needs.
I hope you will enjoy it
 
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