Cloning hard drives

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Solecs

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Hi there I have been researching hard drive cloning. What I want to do is clone a hard drive directly to another hard drive and be able to use the cloned drive in a new computer. the hardware will be the same I am just wondering if the unique ID's will be the same. I am not worried about the product key codes I have a open license key so it doesn't matter there. Windows XP is going to be on all the computers and I will be coping the original hard drive about 30 times for each of the computers.

Thanks,
Solecs
 
Use whatever cloning software you want, like acronis, clonezilla, etc, then on the second computer run NewSID and trigger the key change / activation process with this procedure.
 
I have a similar question. I have two HDDs, one has my O/S and all my misc apps while the other has all my games on it. If I were to clone my main HDD should I be able to play all the games on my second HDD fine?
 
^Yes, if you used the second hard drive as your master(boot).

I have had great luck with Acronis True Image boot cd.
 
worked great except that the NewSID tool was "retired" by Microsoft, but the guy who developed it said that after looking through reports and talking to Windows security and deployment teams at Microsoft they couldn't come up with scenario where duplicate SID's would be a problem. But if you really want to change the SID you can use Sysprep to change it. Thanks for the help with this problem MrsOldMX.
 
Solecs said:
Hi there I have been researching hard drive cloning. What I want to do is clone a hard drive directly to another hard drive and be able to use the cloned drive in a new computer. the hardware will be the same I am just wondering if the unique ID's will be the same. I am not worried about the product key codes I have a open license key so it doesn't matter there. Windows XP is going to be on all the computers and I will be coping the original hard drive about 30 times for each of the computers.

Thanks,
Solecs
Click to expand...

Handy Backup allows you to clone hard drive with all contents or, separately, clone partition; hdd cloning is performed through hard disk imaging.
 
does Handy Backup need to have software installed onto the computer just like Norton Ghost?
 
I would just use Clonezilla Live. It's free, works great and is FAST!

Used it over 100 times with numerous OS's from XP to W7. Not a single issue.

I use Acronis as well, but it's bit bloaty and slow at times. For cloning drives without a doubt just use the latest CloneZilla stable version. Also works great with USB HDD's.
 
Any clone/ghosting program has it's benefits as well as flaws. I have used Ghost 9 ran through a PE Environment for the last 5 years. I ran it this way because it was very easy to update new network drives. I started to switch over to Clonezilla to see how that would go but Alas, I am going to a different department which will probably do cloning/imaging/ghosting differently (pay raise and basically the same work).
 
what i ended up using is Disk Copy (its free) with a combo of sysprep (windows SID changing program on windows disks) which makes the computer think it is a new install and can take you through the mini setup thing in windows when you first buy a out of the box computer. Seems to work really well just need to be very careful when using the disk copy or you can clone a blank drive instead of what you wanted to clone.
 
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