How Do you clone a HDD

[Durvelle27]

i have a pc with a 1.5GBs HDD and i want to replace it with a 3GBs HDD but don't want to lose any of my apps or data how can i do this ?

 

[timta2]

Usually if it's a retail box it will come with software to do the cloning. If you buy OEM, check the manufacturer's website to see if they offer cloning software. For example, Western Digital offers a limited edition of Acronis True Image, that will get the job done for free.

http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp?swid=119

 

[Durvelle27]

does it work with any drive ?

 

[daglesj]

Minitool Partition Wizard Home edition.

Free and works a treat. Plenty of other features too.

 

[Durvelle27]

Minitool Partition Wizard Home edition.

Free and works a treat. Plenty of other features too.

gonna take a look at that ? thx

 

[drescherjm]

I expect this is not the answer you want however you asked how I clone a drive. For me I stick in my trusty usb stick that has a sysrescue cd (bootable linux livecd) and I use fdisk, smartctl and hdparm to figure out what are the source disk and the destination disk then I type

dd if=sourcedevice of=destinationdevice BS=8M

or depending on my mood I may use dd_rescue instead. Although I admit for that one I have to check the syntax everytime I use it since the parameters are not as full prof as dd. Remember not to get the source and destination backwards on either of these linux does not care if you overwrite your good data with the 0s that are on the new drive...

With that said for those who are inexperienced with linux, I recommend either the free acronis or clonezilla.

 

[daglesj]

Partition Wizard - About 4 clicks of the mouse.

Done. Why make it any more difficult?