Need help finding decent HDD cloning software...

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Dew itt right

2[H]4U
Joined
Oct 28, 2005
Messages
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I'll get straight to the point, I'm looking for a program that can make a perfect bootable cloned copy of my system drive. I'm assuming it'll have to be a program that runs off a bootable CD since all the Windows programs I've tried have problems copying locked files. I want to keep a cloned mirror of my system drive that I can update or re-clone every week or so but I don't want to do a mirrored RAID array because I want to keep the backup hard drive disconnected from the system when not in use.

The best I've found so far was Copywipe off the free Ultimate Boot CD, however the program either numbered the drives incorrectly or carried out the task incorrectly because it wound up copying the blank backup drive onto my system drive. Yep, I lost everything! So it'd also be nice to be able to somehow either browse the contents of the drives before cloning or atleast see the sizes of the drives so I can make sure the source and destination drives are correct.

For what it's worth, the system's is in the sig. Any help is greatly appriciated...
 
Acronis TrueImage

Also check WD's site for their own program as I'm pretty sure they have one.

If you had a Seagate drive you could use MaxBlast which is actually based around Acronis TrueImage.
 
+1 for Seagate DiscWizard, I'm pretty sure it works on any drive regardless of manufacturer plus it's powered by Acronis, unless you can get a full version of the real Acronis; don't bother with any 30 day trials.

Used it to clone my boot drive over from an old IDE drive to my new SATA one, and that was years ago
 
G4U. Its free, BSD based. Images your whole hard drive via FTP. I love it for all my images.
 
carried out the task incorrectly because it wound up copying the blank backup drive onto my system drive. Yep, I lost everything!
Click to expand...
Looks like that Copywipe is a cloning/wiping application. Acronis can clone, do images, and let you explore and verify when you are done.


Ya can't beat Acronis. Saved my buns many-a-time!
 
Call me crazy, but I still like to use Ghost 2003. Configure what you want to do in windows,then the system restarts and does the clone in DOS mode so you dont have to deal with protected file issues. The only issue that I have with 2003 is that sometimes I have to reboot with the Ghost cd to fix the MBR on ntfs clones before it will boot into windows properly.
 
+1 TrueImage. I had to boot from their 'rescue disk' to have the clone actually work, and it took forever, though.
 
Thanks for the replies guys! Sorry for the delay in response, it's been a crazy week - I totalled my car so the wife and I have been searching the world over for another car. Even spent 4.5hrs at an auction on Saturday for nothing... :(

Anyway, nothing seems to be working. I've tried Discwizard and it says te PC must have atleast 1 connected Seagate drive. The backup drive IS a seagate and the device manger shows it's model number and everything but apparenty Discwizard doesn't recognize it as a Seagate drive.

I downloaded the trial of acronis and tried to use the Cloning tool, It says the Cloning function requires atleast 2 connected drives and my PC only has one. What the frick, I have TWO DRIVES!! I even used Seagates diagnostic software and tested all of the drives, everything passed with flying colors. I can read to and write from the drive in windows just fine. Why won't these two programs see the drive?

Even if I go to write an image of the system drive, when I browse for a destination the Seagate (backup) drive shows up just fine. I'm going to try this for now and see if I can atleast get an image saved. Thanks for the help. I'm definitly in need of it...
 
I'm uncertain as to how much 'help' this is, but I use Ghost to deploy images for around 300-400 computers a year, three times a year and the only issues I've ever had with it have been resolved by injecting myself with more caffeine ;)
 
Dew itt right said:
I downloaded the trial of acronis and tried to use the Cloning tool, It says the Cloning function requires atleast 2 connected drives and my PC only has one.
Click to expand...

Perhaps the program expects the drive to be set up in Windows first (control panel->administrative tools->computer management->disk management) with a drive signature or whatever Windows does to mark a drive as active.

I had a lot of issues too, which were all resolved by creating a rescue/offline Acronis program disc and booting from it, and doing the clone from there. I don't know what they're using for a windows emulator but the UI was horribly slow, but it does work (eventually).

Windows didn't need to be re-activated afterwards when booting from the new drive, nor did I need to disconnect the old drive, but a few other programs (e.g Adobe) did need to be re-activated.
 
You can use any decent Linux live CD, such as Knoppix:
http://www.knoppix.org/

As long as the target drive is at least as big as the source drive, this will make a perfect copy:
Code: 
# dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=1M

- /dev/sda is the source disk; change as needed
- /dev/sdb is the destination disk; change as needed
- bs=1M makes dd copy in 1MB blocks, which should be a little faster than the default

If you don't know which drive is the source and which is the destination, I wrote a little one-liner script for you:
Code: 
# for dev in /dev/[hs]d? ; do echo $dev ; hdparm -I $dev | grep Model ; done

Don't mix up the source and destination! The dd program doesn't care what it's copying.

-Corey
 
Well, I'm just going to give up on the hopes of creating a bootable clone. BTW, yes the drive was setup in the Disk Management window and it was formatted, active, and empty. I think much of the hassle is being caused by the fact that the physical size of the backup drive is smaller than the system drive (although the actual disk usage is significantly smaller than both of them). I did get Acronis to write a full system image to the backup disk. I think I'll just buy a copy of Acronis now and if the time ever comes that I need to, I'll try booting from the Acronis CD, write the backup image to the system drive, and see how it goes. Worst case scenario is that I'd end up reinstalling Vista and grabbing the files I need out of the image. Either way I think I'll be just fine. Thanks again for the help.
 
4saken said:
G4U. Its free, BSD based. Images your whole hard drive via FTP. I love it for all my images.
Click to expand...


5.4 A word on disk sizes

The question how g4u deals with different disk sizes arises a lot too. The general answer is, g4u works best with identical disk sizes & geometry. Putting an image from a small disk on a big disk works, putting an image from a big disk to a small disk is likely to cause problems.

If you cannot avoid preparing an image on a big disk that'll get deployed to a small disk later, make sure the "extra" space is not occupied by a active partition or filesystem, else data loss is very likely to occur!

If you intend to deploy a "small" image to a "big" disk, the extra space that's not covered by g4u can be used for creating a partition and a filesystem. You will have to do that on your own, e.g. using your operating systems' post installation steps.
Click to expand...


very lame... but definitely a project worth keeping an eye on
 
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