What's the best way to clone a hard drive?

Gordon Gekko · Jul 5, 2003

Quote from MrDinky:

Just curious, did you do this on an XP boot drive and get it to work ok?

yes, the cloned drive was a boot drive. the key is to use the -FDSP switch. if you want to use a cloned drive as a boot drive and you clone a boot drive without the -FDSP switch, windows will not boot on the cloned drive. this is exactly what i did:

took the new hd out of the new computer and put it in my old one. i formatted the new one. my old computer has norton ghost on it. i cloned the old hd onto the new hd using the -FDSP switch in ghost command line options. then i put the new drive back into the new computer and it booted fine with win xp pro.

keep in mind, that when you first boot off your old hd on a new computer, windows is going to be detecting new hardware. you may have to fiddle with things to get everything working perfect. i eventually got everything to work and i'm using a cloned boot drive right now.

i also then put the old hd into the new computer as a slave drive, formatted that one as well, and i use that drive for mp3s and to backup important files.

MrDinky · Jul 5, 2003

Quote from saxon:

I would suggest that you check out a utility called Casper XP. It makes an exact (bootable) copy of your hard drive. I use it all the time to copy to a backup drive, and I've never had a problem.

Sounds like a good program. I'll check it out. Thanks for the link.

MrDinky · Jul 5, 2003

Quote from Gordon Gekko:

yes, the cloned drive was a boot drive. the key is to use the -FDSP switch. if you want to use a cloned drive as a boot drive and you clone a boot drive without the -FDSP switch, windows will not boot on the cloned drive.

Thanks again for the info. I'm glad XP can be copied. I've heard of horror stories about non-bootable drives due to XP's copy protection scheme and all that.

MrDinky · Jul 5, 2003

Quote from nkhoi:

that remind me matrox drive come with clone software, it clone the old drive to the new in no time.

Just curious whether that was XP you were cloning as I just read some HD reviews on Maxtor drives that said their MaxBlast software did not clone XP correctly. According to them, the only to get XP to work was to do a fresh install (which I really want to avoid.)

nkhoi · Jul 5, 2003

I cloned win98 not XP

Catoosa · Jul 5, 2003

Quote from MrDinky:

Just curious, are you using external drives and USB to do your backups?

MrDinky:

I use two removable hard drive bays in each tower case. The primary drive stays in one of the bays and I slip in one of the backup drives in the other open bay when I want to make a exact duplicate of my primary drive. I slip the hard drive utility tools disk into the "A" drive, turn on the PC power and I get the exact duplicate. I pay about $10 each for the removable bays from computergate.com.

nitro · Jul 5, 2003

I use products from:

http://www.powerquest.com/

They have always worked well for me.

nitro

max401 · Jul 6, 2003

Quote from nitro:

I use products from:

http://www.powerquest.com/

They have always worked well for me.

nitro

http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2003/2003-07-03.htm

MrDinky · Jul 6, 2003

Picked up a 120GB Maxtor from Best Buy, $80 after playing the rebate game, still that price is even better than I was seeing on pricewatch (sale ends today, though.)

Used Maxtor's own MaxBlast to clone the drive. Was already apprehensive as it couldn't recognize my Promise controller and crashed when booting off the CD in DOS mode. Installed it in XP and, amazingly, it worked. Not impressed with their software as it forced its partition settings on me (one the size of the old drive, a second for the extra space). Not a "perfect" clone. I notice system restore crashes now. A couple other programs come up with funny messages, like needing to renew registration, but nothing life threatening.

I'm just surprised it actually worked. Thanks everyone who helped.

Ken_DTU · Jul 6, 2003

installing removable swap drives (wd 120 gigs) w/promise raid mirror array here, rotating a 3rd one every few days ... should be useful ...

i haven't tried any of the hd ghosting type apps like the ones above, always concerned about the program not correctly copying the MBR or assigning drive letters or having an ide conflict w/master/cs/slave settings etc... i should probably learn though

swap drives w/promise raid mirror array sounds like a good solution though... that way i will always have a current duplicate of whatever my drive has, to the second, along with a 'last known good' version from a few days ago on the 3rd drive...

in other news, so far so good w/the new asus p4c800 m/b, so much faster than the intel mp4 m/b i'd been using .. fwiw..