Cloning with old rives

[jakgeoffsub]

Hi...I clone my C/boot drive cos I'm either smart or paranoid...a bit of both I think One cloner has proven itself to be iffy so I am dumping it and considering three others as the next best option as a backup/clone drive. Can you assist me in determining which drive would be most efficient please-
Maxtor 541DX; 20Gb/5400rpm U/ATA 100
Maxtor Diamondmax 92049U6; 20Gb/+6800 U/ATA 66
Maxtor D740X-6L 60Gb/ 7200rpm/ ATA 133

On another matter, for the cloning I am using True Image Echo Wkstn which has been working fine. One frustration - and perhaps you can clarify my confusion here. My boot drive is around 18 gigs. If I use a 60gig drive as a clone, thereafter I cannot use a drive of smaller capacity cloning from that larger drive as I understand it. It tells me there is not enough capacity on that smaller drive - ie, it requires at least the same capacity as the former, the 60gig drive. Can you clarify if this is true or is there a way around it. I tried partitioning the 60gig but that didn't work.
Thx

 

[Paperdoc]

Go to the Seagate website and look for their Seagate Disk Wizard software, download for free. It will ONLY make clones TO a Seagate drive (does not care what the origin drive is). Now, you have Maxtor's, but Seagate bought them and I think (you need to check) their software will do Maxtor's, too. If not, look at the Maxtor sections of their website for similar tools.

With Seagate's Disk Wizard you can clone a drive. It was designed for helping you to install a new Seagate drive to replace an old drive, and it can make a complete bootable clone for that purpose. But it also does the same job to accomplish what you want. In making the clone, you need to look through the menus and set source and destination drives, of course. You also need to specify two important options: make the clone a bootable drive, and specify the copy's size. Obviously, the clone copy drive must be big enough to hold all the data. By default it may want to use up all the destination drive's space, but you can set it smaller. Based on this it creates the partition size you specify and then clones to it. So you could make your backup clone on a 60 GB drive but tell it to use only a 20 GB partition to do it. Then when you use the clone to restore to a 20 GB drive it should work just fine.

It MAY be possible to use this software to take 18GB of cloned data on a 60GB drive and restore it to a 20 GB drive by specifying the smaller destination drive's size. I don't know for sure. But making the original clone a bit smaller than the size of the ultimate restored destination drive (20 GB) should allow you to get it done.

Only loose end I see in this: what is your current drive's manufacturer? You can make the original backup clone to a Seagate (or maybe Maxtor) drive with this tool, but when you go to restore back to the old drive, it becomes the destination. The Disk Wizard will only make the clone TO a Seagate (or maybe Maxtor) drive.

 

[jakgeoffsub]

Thx very much for that info Paperdoc. You have explained in a very erudite manner. I shall try it all out in the morning and let you know all the results. Once again thank you.

 

[jakgeoffsub]

Meanwhile, ages later...sorry 'bout that
I couldn't find a way to resize the drive using the Maxtor software, which is slow and a vastly sized program - 128 mg or so file size!...so gave it a miss. Did find that through True Image Echo Workstation it can be done [resize]. Moving on to other drama's. Bye