Tom's Hardware > Forum > Storage > General Storage > Looking for good HDD partition cloning utility

Looking for good HDD partition cloning utility

Forum Storage : General Storage - Looking for good HDD partition cloning utility

Tom's Hardware: Over 1.4 million members in 6 different countries available to answer all your high-tech questions. Sign up now! Its free!
Ask the community Add a reply
Word :    Username :           
 
Nils   09-23-2008 at 03:08:18 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

Add a reply
Sponsored Links
Register or log in to remove.
Bronze Storage badge Paperdoc   09-23-2008 at 04:11:10 PM
- 0 +

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.

Reply to Paperdoc
Nils   09-23-2008 at 05:24:30 PM
- 0 +

Thanks a lot for the reply, Paperdoc.

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

Reply to Nils
br3nd064   09-24-2008 at 03:25:11 AM
- 0 +

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

Reply to br3nd064
dokk2   09-24-2008 at 03:48:59 AM
- 0 +

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

Reply to dokk2
Nils   09-24-2008 at 05:45:46 PM
- 0 +

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?

Message quoted 1 times
Message edited by Nils on 09-24-2008 at 05:47:10 PM
Reply to Nils
Nils   09-24-2008 at 07:29:59 PM
- 0 +

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?

Reply to Nils
br3nd064   09-24-2008 at 08:50:52 PM
- 0 +

Nils wrote :

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.

Reply to br3nd064
ssheaf   09-29-2008 at 08:54:22 AM
- 0 +

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/suppo [...] 0219171513 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.

Reply to ssheaf
Ask the community Add a reply
Tom's Hardware > Forum > Storage > General Storage > Looking for good HDD partition cloning utility
Go to:

There are 554 identified and unidentified users. To see the list of identified users, Click here.

Forum map
Bestofmedia Forum ©
2000-2009 Bestofmedia Group
Page generated in 0.499 seconds
Please mind

You are about to answer a thread that has been inactive for more than 6 months.
If you still wish to proceed, please ensure that your posting is original and does not duplicate or overlap any prior responses to this thread.

Add a reply Cancel
Sponsored links
  • Ask the community now
  • Publish
Ad
They won a badge
Join us in greeting them