Free Drive Cloning

[hella-d]

Hey Guys I Have A Simple Question But A Search Turned Up Nothing But Dead Ends...

Im Replacing My Builds 120GB 3.5" Western Digital SATA Main (Boot And Apps) With A 250GB 2.5" Western Digital SATA (I Only Use WD In My Builds) Anyway I Dont Wana Hafta Reinstall Everything Witch Is A Major Pain Is There A Free Cloning App That Can Do Such A Thing Even In Single Partioined Bootable Drives Of Different Sizes? I Know Hardware VERY Well, But Ive Never Cloned A Drive. Thank You

 

[quesionboy]

Hey Guys I Have A Simple Question But A Search Turned Up Nothing But Dead Ends...

Im Replacing My Builds 120GB 3.5" Western Digital SATA Main (Boot And Apps) With A 250GB 2.5" Western Digital SATA (I Only Use WD In My Builds) Anyway I Dont Wana Hafta Reinstall Everything Witch Is A Major Pain Is There A Free Cloning App That Can Do Such A Thing Even In Single Partioined Bootable Drives Of Different Sizes? I Know Hardware VERY Well, But Ive Never Cloned A Drive. Thank You

Hi, if your os is 32 bit, you could use the Partition Assistant Home Edition which is a free partition software, and you could also refer to this arctile about "how to clone hard drive to another hard drive"

Hope this could help you

 

[Hawkeye22]

Grab a copy of clonezilla, Easeus backup, or Macrium Reflect.

 

[Paperdoc]

Since you have WD hardware, go to their website and download for free, then install on your existing C: drive, their utility called Acronis True Image WD Edition. It is a customized version of a good package from Acronis. It does cloning very well, and is well suited to this task of migrating everything to a larger HDD that takes over as your C: boot drive. BUT it does a LOT of other things, too, so get and read the Manual file for it.

A hint for you: many of these packages do one thing I find wrong. By default they will propose to make the Partition on the Destination HDD the same size as the Partition on the Source. If you just confirm the defaults, you will end up with a C: drive on the new HDD that is still 120 GB, plus a bunch of Unallocated Space in which you could Create / Format a second Partition to be another "drive". I think most people like you want the WHOLE new drive to be used for C: . That can be done! This is why I said, read the manual. In the section on cloning it will show you how the menu systems work so you can change the default settings to what you want before running the cloning operation.

 

[l0ckd0wn]

Since you have WD hardware, go to their website and download for free, then install on your existing C: drive, their utility called Acronis True Image WD Edition. It is a customized version of a good package from Acronis. It does cloning very well, and is well suited to this task of migrating everything to a larger HDD that takes over as your C: boot drive. BUT it does a LOT of other things, too, so get and read the Manual file for it.

A hint for you: many of these packages do one thing I find wrong. By default they will propose to make the Partition on the Destination HDD the same size as the Partition on the Source. If you just confirm the defaults, you will end up with a C: drive on the new HDD that is still 120 GB, plus a bunch of Unallocated Space in which you could Create / Format a second Partition to be another "drive". I think most people like you want the WHOLE new drive to be used for C: . That can be done! This is why I said, read the manual. In the section on cloning it will show you how the menu systems work so you can change the default settings to what you want before running the cloning operation.

QFT

Acronis is a great product and fairly straight forward. I ran into some issues with them recognizing drives with an older version, but I can only assume they've updated accordingly as the product seems to be very popular.

 

[hella-d]

Thanks Guys That Will Do Fine, By The Way My Specs SHOULD Have Shown Up On My Sig But For Some Odd Reason When I Check The Box It Never Does Untill Today That Is, Must Have Been A Bug In The Forums HTML, I Also Fixed Some Typos In My Sig (My Ram Was Mistyped As DDR2-1600 Ha Yeah Right, I Hate Typos!.......

 

[hella-d]

Best answer selected by Hella-D.