Yea so I had to do some cloning recently. The first thing I tried was clonezilla but that didn't work, at reaching one particular stage in the process it kept freezing up, well that's how it seemed me. There were a few prompts to go through and they weren't as straightforward as I would have liked so opted out of that one.
The next one I tried was hdclone free edition.
This one was real intuitive and easy to use. Its seemed to do the job just fine. Taking 2 hours to clone a 40GB hardrive. A bit long I thought but it was my first time cloning a harddrive.
- On completing the process I booted up using the old harddrive, the new one was set to slave, it worked fine.
- Shut down and booted up using the new harddrive, it booted up too, but after booting I realized that applications weren't working right and I couldn't access Disk Manager and it kept freezing. I figured this was happening because ( I purposely didn't follow instructions)
I didn't disconnect the old harddrive after cloning).
- Disconnected the old hardrive and rebooted with the new drive. This time it froze at the windows log on screen and wouldn't move.
I'm not sure if this happened because I had failed to disable the old harddrive as is supposed to be done after a cloning procedure. I switched around the master and slave again and the same exact thing happened in each instance.
The program also had 4 read errors upon completing the process , I ran the cloning process 2 times and it still carried the same error. Based on the interface I guess the paid program works better. So this one clones the drive(slowly) but didn't allow me to use the new hard drive right off the bat.
Next I tried G parted recommended here by Nestersan. This one looked really promising. Easy to use too, the user interface responds a bit slowly but real easy to get used to. I noticed however that the software was showing blank for the used and unused portion of the disk, not sure why it was doing that but I went ahead. Ran the copy process and 2 seconds later it stops, saying it is unable to copy the harddrive. Clicked on the disk information button and it said there was at least one bad sector on the disk and it could not copy the disk.
(Before doing all of this cloning thing I had ran CHKDSK and it only found 4kb in a bad sector, all file systems were good. Ran chkdsk /f and /r.)
G parted however had some issue with my source drive and it wouldn't budge. This program had everything, it cloned and allowed me to resize partitions. I'm not sure why it wasn't tolerating my harddrive.
The next program I tried was MaxBlast
Its only supposed to be used with Maxtor harddrives. Used this and it only took like 15 minutes to clone a 40GB harddrive.No problems at all, worked perfectly, extremely easy to use and it allows me to resize the partition of the target harddrive. Real nice. I guess most hard drive manufacturers offer programs like these for free. This one from Maxtor is powered by Acronis.
All the other programmes required me to create a boot disk, MaxBlast does everything from windows, no need for cds here.
I'm not sure why Gparted had a problem with my drive. In regard to Hdclone free edition maybe it didn't work because I failed to immediately remove the source drive after cloning, I'm not sure.
These are all free programs. I'm sure the paid programs are great. Acronis must be the best though, that MaxBlast application is wicked and its powered by Acronis.
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Originally Posted by frass2000
