Clone Hard Drive

Bob,

We have two identical hardware configured laptops.

I have recently made a disk image backup using the utility in WIN7. on one of the machines.

The other machine has somehow picked up some nasty stuff, slowed down, takes ages to bootup.

Could you walk me through the process I would need to take to use the image backup to repair the slow machine. including the "signature" bit!.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Steve, this should help: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Restore-your-computer-from-a-system-image-backup

I have been taking a disk image of my hard drive on the 1st of each month for several years, the only back-up I do. Yesterday morning the drive crashed, it would not boot, no safe mode or anything. After a couple forced shut-downs, I noticed that I could hear the HD spinning when the start button was pushed. I use Macrium Refect Free, and you're required to burn a Linux Rescue CD, which was pretty easy. So yesterday with the power on I opened the CD drive put in the Rescue CD, then forced shut-down. Then before the restart push the CD in, then the start button. The program will then boot, walk you through a couple screens, then it will start the image. Worked perfectly, computer back to normal.

Have had good results with Acronis True Image Home ($50). It does backup and restores to and from the network, as well.

For Mac I would suggest superduper. It's free and better than any paid alternative.

I use an older version of Macrium Reflect Free Edition (32-bit) Software version 4.2 Build 2055 works great!

I'm sure the newer updated version works well also,but why update when this version is working well for me?

Nice review as always.

I regularly use Clonezilla Live (http://clonezilla.org/), which is a free and standalone utility.
I have had very good results using it to upgrade Windows, Linux, and VMWare machines to larger disk drives.
I usually write the image to a network share, but have also used local storage, both with reasonable performance.

Hi Bob

I use Acronis True Image Home as well. I make a new complete drive image any time I make a major change in software and an incremental backup 3X a week. To me its worth it at least when I loose the HD I do not have to go through the hours of basic install catch up, not to mention data lost.

I guess HD cloning only works if the image is restored on the same brand and model of hard drive, right? And what about if I try to restore an image on a PC with a different motherboard model? Won't there be drivers' conflicts? (Different chipset, microprocessor, video card, sound card, etc. all of which require their own drivers.)
I've never done a restore based on an image, so I am curious to hear what others have to say about all this.

I am imaging over a network connection. ReDo is free and works well imaging a HD. No issue seeing the network, however, never succeeded backing up or applying new image over a network.

I have been using Acronis True Image for close to five years now and consider it $50 well spent. I clone my primary drive to a backup drive once a week. Most of the time I leave the backup drive offline. It has saved my bacon a couple of times when I got hit with malware. And it also comes in handy for replacing an old hard drive with a newer one.

Do you have any (preferably free priced) disk cloning/imaging software recommendations for Ubuntu Linux and Microsoft Windows (especially XP) dual booters? Do you have to backup outside of Linux to get a disk clone with Linux? If not I could probably use regular backup apps like backintime or sbackup to make an image of Windows and Linux while running Linux.

The only HDD clone tool I've ever succeeded with is Macrium Reflect, though I only tried free ones and not many of them. Reflect worked _exactly_ as advertised, and proved adequate for my needs. It allowed me to restore Win XP to a new, larger C: drive, thus relieving my problem, running out of space on C:.

Nice.

Jim Harris

Please add to my previous (only) post:

Another neat feature of Macrium Reflect is that it works over a LAN, and will write its image file on a computer running a different OS than the source. For example, I backed up my Win XP image on my Ubuntu Linux box on a drive using the EXT3 file system on a drive partition, and Reflect didn't care at all except I needed to type my login info when it connected to that Linux computer, which is exactly what it should do, of course.

IHTH

Jim Harris

PLEASE ,can some member provide me with more detailed info, regarding this mentioned program ;
'' and ShadowProtect ($89.95). Although it's the most expensive of those offerings, ShadowProtect has an interesting feature called VirtualBoot, which allows you to right-click backup image and boot it as a virtual machine.

Re Jimmy Robinson Oct 06:

That capability (booting from the "backup image") is also provided by Seagate DiskWizard (free). Depending on the OS's you are running and how/where you want to write your image (e.g. on a new drive in e.g. a USB-attached HDD enclosure or equivalent), DiskWizard may well be all you need/want.

Activ@ Disk Image ($39) seems to offer something similar, but I can't tell from their product description. I plan to try Seagate's DiskWizard on Win 7 (7 is supported; they just forgot to mention that on their WWW page) this weekend; I will try to remember to update this post afterwards. IHTH Jim

I am hoping the following quote from your article does NOT apply to "simply" upgrading my laptop hard drive:

You can use disk cloning to transfer all of your hard drive's contents to a completely different computer (not just a new drive in the same computer). But you must prepare carefully for such a move if you use Microsoft Windows.

To prevent unauthorized copying of Windows, Microsoft creates a "signature" file on each licensed Windows installation that ties a copy of Windows to the specific hardware upon which it is installed. Move that copy of Windows to a different machine and the signatures won't match; Windows may refuse to start. To overcome this difficulty you can run the Microsoft Sysprep utility on your old computer and the new one before cloning. Some disk cloning programs also re-create a new signature file for Windows when necessary.

As long as same install is going onto original machine, I do not have to be concerned with Sysprep. Right?

I'm noting that Sysprep is not mentioned in your article on replacing laptop HD.
BUT, I must also note that I date from the good old days of MSDOS and I've never had this much trouble replacing a hard drive. Perhaps the lack of a CD/DVD drive is problem. I do NOT know anymore. At end of rope... really
Thanks. I'm probably just suffering from information overload. Not even Save-Partition has worked for me.

Hey, i used macrium to clone my server 2003 gui disk, but when i tried to open the new 1tb hdd, I found some files got lost. So I would like to choose another one, todo backup, ok, fine cloned hdd. But it cost me 26' to complete the cloning process, I don't know there is something wrong with my operation or is this an slow feature of todo backup?
I checked the guides, here
http://www.todo-backup.com/backup-resource/free-disk-cloning-software.htm
And I found all my works are matched with that.
So friends, would you please help me check this?
thanks

I presume I made an expensive mistake by buying PowerSuite Golden Edition. My 2005 Dell XP desktop is giving me all kinds of problems and sounds like a thrashing machine so I replaced it with another XP because I switch back and forth with my 2005 Dell laptop and several of my favorite programs will not work on Vista or 7. While I was using my laptop to refer to when setting up my desktop, it died. I replaced it with a refurbished Dell with XP laptop, set it up and installed all my programs. After all this, I decided to buy an external hard drive (500 gb) and the program mentioned above, planning to clone both my machines on it as soon as I had the settings and my programs on them as well as use it for incremental backup since there would be plenty of room.

Problem - I have been told that once I clone one PC on the external, the only thing I can do on that HD is update it with a clone of the same machine or I would have to partition the external HD to clone both of them on it and that I would have to determine how much space the partitions needed to be before I did. Nothing I have read on line has any information on that and I have emailed back and forth with PowerSuite but all I get is geek talk I don’t understand. They never even refer to my question. So, so right now my laptop is sitting all set up with my programs, waiting for me to clone it before my old desktop dies (which I thought it had yesterday) because I wanted to clone it before I added all my data.

CAN ANYONE HELP ME?