Looking for good HDD partition cloning utility

Nils

September 23, 2008 1:08:18 PM

Hi,

I'm thinking of replacing my current windows boot HDD with a newer one.
The HDD is partitioned like this: One primairy active partition in NTFS with windows on it and a second extended partition with one logical drive in FAT32.
I already have a utility to make image backups of the entire ntfs partition, but the problem with it is that if you would restore that image to another partition with another size, it will change the total size of that new partition to the size of the partition the image was taken from. It will even turn a FAT32 partition into a NTFS one!
So does anyone know an application that can clone any windows boot partition, no matter what the size of the source and destination partition is (of course it has to be big enough), and still make it possible to boot windows from that new drive, of course.

Thanks

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Paperdoc

Storage Expert

September 23, 2008 2:11:10 PM

I've used Seagate's Disk Wizard software for this. It is free so you can move to a new HDD, but the one I had will only make a clone TO a SEAGATE drive (does not care the source maker). Anyway, it will set up a partition on the destination drive, format it, mark it bootable, and clone everything from source to destination. In doing this you have the option to set manually the size of the partition and the type of file system on the destination drive.

Seagate's Disk Wizard appears to be a customized version of Acronis, so maybe the commercial Acronis can do this for any drives. Alternatively if you're not an all-Seagate setup, you may find free software for this purpose from other HDD makers on their websites. I don't know whether theirs will offer the choices, though.

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Nils

September 23, 2008 3:24:30 PM

Thanks a lot for the reply, Paperdoc.

I think I can use acronis migrate easy for it. Has anyone already worked with it?

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br3nd064

September 24, 2008 1:25:11 AM

I've used acronis and haven't had any problems.

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dokk2

September 24, 2008 1:48:59 AM

norton ghost 2003,,all the way,fits on a single floppy,and will dupe one hdd to another asap..

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Nils

September 24, 2008 3:45:46 PM

even if both partitions have a different size?
so if i would clone a 30 GB pri act part with windows on it to a new 50 GB pri act part with ghost2003, i would be able to boot from that new drive and use the full 50GB?

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Nils

September 24, 2008 5:29:59 PM

I've tried out ghost 2003 in dos, but for some reasons it does not seem to run properly. The program starts but all i see is the blue background of ghost but no text or menu appears. I've tried it on another PC and then it works. Maybe it has no support for SATA drives.
btw: does the new ghost 14 also have a dos application?

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br3nd064

September 24, 2008 6:50:52 PM

Nils said:

even if both partitions have a different size?
so if i would clone a 30 GB pri act part with windows on it to a new 50 GB pri act part with ghost2003, i would be able to boot from that new drive and use the full 50GB?

I think you have to backup the partition, then restore it on the new drive.

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ssheaf

September 29, 2008 6:54:22 AM

Yep,

I have used ghost 2003, but SATA drives can be an issue unless you download the patches - take a look at http://service1.symantec.com/support/sharedtech.nsf/doc... and get to build 793 (in my case I needed to repeat the archive downloads - two sequential updates).

Not only can you change partition sizes, you can also extract/restore partitions individually from a full drive image. It also supports USB HDDs etc.

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