Legit Reviews

Hey gang!

I need some help here. I need to Ghost/Clone a hard drive in my moms PC. It's currently on a 40G IDE drive and I'm going to move it to one of my spare 600GB IDE drives. It's running XP and is about an 8 year old Sony. I don't think I'd find the drivers again if I had to resinstall everything as the original backup partition was deleted some time ago.

That leads me to wanting to clone the drive. I've been looking at things like PING and Clonezilla but they all seem to be geared towards either making images or doing multicast images across a LAN. All I want to do is clone one IDE HD in a machine to another.

Do any of you know of a freeware program to do this as I'd like to stay legal and no longer have access to Ghost or Partition Magic. I've seen a previous thread on this topic but it's a year old and I'm hoping theres some newer information available.

- Skip

acronis is a utility that most use these days

I use Clonzilla, I have it on an old SD card and boot from that.
I save my images to a NAS on the network.
I don't keep many files on my main laptop, keeping most on the NAS so backups contain just the OS and installed apps.
Once every ~3mths I create a new image. The image size for me is ~6GB as I use compression.

You don't need to use Clonzilla as a server, there's the client version too.

kenc51 wrote:I use Clonzilla, I have it on an old SD card and boot from that.
I save my images to a NAS on the network.
I don't keep many files on my main laptop, keeping most on the NAS so backups contain just the OS and installed apps.
Once every ~3mths I create a new image. The image size for me is ~6GB as I use compression.

You don't need to use Clonzilla as a server, there's the client version too.

So CloneZilla can be used to clone drive to drive in the same machine without first writing an image?

Skippman wrote:

kenc51 wrote:I use Clonzilla, I have it on an old SD card and boot from that.
I save my images to a NAS on the network.
[snip]
You don't need to use Clonzilla as a server, there's the client version too.

So CloneZilla can be used to clone drive to drive in the same machine without first writing an image?

Ahh, I don't think so. I can't remember if it has that option. If I remember, I'll check later for you.

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

I have used it very successfully at several customers. I have even managed to image an old NT4 drive and restore the image to a much larger drive on another machine due to the original PC being extremely corroded (yay chemicals!). It can be used to do a disk to disk clone, or to create an image to restore later.

The paid versions also have a ton more features, though for what you are asking this should do exactly what you need very easily.

Oh, and the software is just install and run. I have always pulled the drive and imaged them on a separate machine though so I am not sure how it works cloning the current active drive (that is an advertised feature, I just have never used that personally).

I use Acronis True Image Western Digital a bunch of times and works great its free.

Acronis or Macrium would be my suggestions.