Hard Drive Clone or Backup and Restore....

Hockeyguyinoc

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Jan 9, 2009
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System:
Dell Vostro 420
Windows XP Pro

Problem:
I have a hard drive from a client that is dying. There are some errors on it and it never really seems to get fixed with scandisk. I'm thinking I will either clone the drive(though this has proven a bit of a challenge.) or back it up and restore it. Acronis won't let me make the partition of the new drive larger due to the errors. I haven't tried ghost I was thinking about trying clonezilla. I would like to use a larger size partition on the new drive but cloning so far has taken 8 hours due to the errors. So I haven't had a lot of time to play around with different options.

I would normally just reinstall everything from scratch the problem is that the client does not have most of the software anymore and I was hoping this would just skip all those problems to clone or back it up and restore it. I know with Adobe Acrobat 8 they have hassled him every time he has had to reinstall it, he said the last time they said no more reinstalling. I'm open to any suggestions at this point.

With the errors what do you think is going to be the better solution backup & restore or clone or am I just out of luck?
 
In a case like this, I would clone. And I wouldn't worry about resizing any partitions.

Don't get sidetracked. Your goal is a working computer with as much software as possible intact when you finish.

You get that far, you can always resize later.
 

cadder

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Nov 17, 2008
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I second this.
 

Hockeyguyinoc

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Jan 9, 2009
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I ended up doing the clone with Acronis. Windows wouldn't boot so I did a repair. Now it is running. I ran scandisk. From windows I adjusted the size of the partition. It seems to be running fine now one big partition. Hopefully all is well from there.