What is the easiest to copy entire harddrive (OS, apps, data) into another one?

sequoia

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 21, 2007
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Hello guys,
I have a friend who life far away, so I can not just stop by and fix this. This would be too easy :D She need to copy her entire harddrive into another harddrive. The harddrive contain the OS, apps, data and everything else. What is the easiest way to do this? She is not really computer savvy, so I am trying to find a way or software that is very user friendly.

Thanks
Chris
 
if you wanna pay: Acronis. Acronis is very easy to use, graphical interface, and has a bunch of drive imaging and backup options by booting to the disc, or installing it in windows.

for free i've only tried clonezilla. It's not graphical, but it gets the job done.

edit: wanted to clarify that an imaged drive may not work in a different computer. Only for exact same hardware.
 
If she has a Seagate/Maxtor or Western Digital Hard drive, both companies offer for free a stripped down version of Acronis True Image that'll allow you to clone the hard drive onto another hard drive.
 
just copy the HD , all of it to another computer may not work due to drives.

is this simply a backup of the files or?
 
I personally use PING and it's worked fine for me, although it doesn't have the easiest or best-looking interface.

edit: This probably won't work for you. It requires use of the command line.
 
If she has a Seagate/Maxtor or Western Digital Hard drive, both companies offer for free a stripped down version of Acronis True Image that'll allow you to clone the hard drive onto another hard drive.

I've heard, but can't confirm, that those versions also work even if you don't have one of those hard drives. I have the full version of Acronis and it works quite the treat.
 
Also if you're moving it from one system to another you can do the sysprep / reseal thing so all the drivers for the hardware are removed, and Windows checks for new hardware on the next boot.

Then clone the drive.
 
Somewhat off topic but...

I have a WD HDD and use the WD branded version of Acronis all the time, works great.

What is holding someone back from using it on say a Samsung drive? I'm assuming it does some type of simple firmware scan or something along those lines, no?
 
Somewhat off topic but...

I have a WD HDD and use the WD branded version of Acronis all the time, works great.

What is holding someone back from using it on say a Samsung drive? I'm assuming it does some type of simple firmware scan or something along those lines, no?


So if I had a 300GB drive and upgraded to a 2TB drive, I could use that program to transfer all my games to the new 2TB drive and have them work with my machine correctly?
 
So if I had a 300GB drive and upgraded to a 2TB drive, I could use that program to transfer all my games to the new 2TB drive and have them work with my machine correctly?

Cloning/imaging copy's the entire contents of the drive to another drive exactly as they where on the original drive. Nothing changes.

So yes.
 
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