good software to clone a hard drive?

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hunter33

Limp Gawd
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Mar 8, 2007
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I just picked up a USB drive enclosure and a new hard drive, and the new hard drive has more cache and is bigger than my existing hard drive. So I want to clone the old drive to the new one and swap them out, and use the old drive in the USB enclosure.

Any good free software out there to clone the old drive to the new one? I have Vista 64bit and Kubuntu 8.10 64bit dual booting on the old drive. Would the Ultimate Boot CD have something on it that would work if I put both drives in the PC at the same time?

Thanks
 
DriveImage XML is free, but doesn't run outside of Windows as it's a Windows-based application.

Most hard drive manufacturers include the ability to do that kind of "drive copy" or cloning/transfer method in their software packages, like Seagate's SeaTools, Maxtor's MaxBlast software, etc. If you happen to have a Seagate or Maxtor drive - and you are obviously going to know when you open that enclosure and see who really makes the drives - the SeaTools software has a stripped down version of Acronis True Image to do such operations and make images as you wish.

I don't know if the UBCD4Win has DriveImage XML on it but I seem to recall that icon on the Desktop the last time I used it. If so, then it should work, but I'd still say go get the manufacturer's drive management software and use that to do the copying/cloning.
 
Thanks. Both are Seagate Barracuda SATA II drives, just the new one is bigger and has twice as much cache. The enclosure I got is generic and does not come with a drive, so that is the reason for ordering the new drive with it. UBCD has several drive cloning tools included, but it sounds like I can use the Seagate tools anyways.
 
Acronis True Image 11 (It's slightly older than the Acronis 2009 version, but works
much better!) I just did a hd clone using drives in a Raid 0 array and everything
went flawlessly. Not one problem or issue.
 
I ran the new UBCD and tried HD Clone, but it was taking too long so I stopped it. Next tried the Seagate tools but they would not respond on the CD. I ended up using EaseUS and it worked great. Cloned the drive in less than an hour and a half and did a perfect job.
 
ZV3001 said:
Acronis True Image 11 (It's slightly older than the Acronis 2009 version, but works
much better!) I just did a hd clone using drives in a Raid 0 array and everything
went flawlessly. Not one problem or issue.
Click to expand...
Curious what differences you found? I've used them both in a limited manner and the only difference I've seen is that the 2009 version supports hardware that 11 didn't work with.
 
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