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

Quote from Sam Mcgee:

Why don't you run a new installation of Windows on your new hard drive? Why would you want to clone the old hard drive and copy all the old problems, hidden programs etc.

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I have a stable and clean system. I think I might cause more problems trying to install the various drivers each time. I'd rather clone it. This program Casper XP seems to be headache-free. I'll try it next week and give you all my feedback.

Chinook
 
I finally cloned my system using Casper XP trial edition. Couple of clicks and after 30 mins, I had a cloned harddrive. This was done all under Win XP without boot disks and booting. The new drive got assigned the drive letter "F".

I swapped the hard drives and made the clone the primary harddrive. It booted without any problems. The new hard drive has 8 MB memory so it will be my primary harddrive. However, I'd like to be able to boot from the secondary hard drive too once in a while to check the cloning operation without swapping hard drives. Unfortunately, my bios doesn't give an option to boot from drive F! This sucks because I have a one year old Dell precision 340. Anyway, I'm looking into multi-booting by changing the boot.ini file but I'm not successful so far. WinXP doesn't want to boot from the F drive. Are there any XP experts out there who knows how to get around this?

Thanks,

Chinook
 
Quote from chinook:

I finally cloned my system using Casper XP trial edition. Couple of clicks and after 30 mins, I had a cloned harddrive. This was done all under Win XP without boot disks and booting. The new drive got assigned the drive letter "F".

I swapped the hard drives and made the clone the primary harddrive. It booted without any problems. The new hard drive has 8 MB memory so it will be my primary harddrive. However, I'd like to be able to boot from the secondary hard drive too once in a while to check the cloning operation without swapping hard drives. Unfortunately, my bios doesn't give an option to boot from drive F! This sucks because I have a one year old Dell precision 340. Anyway, I'm looking into multi-booting by changing the boot.ini file but I'm not successful so far. WinXP doesn't want to boot from the F drive. Are there any XP experts out there who knows how to get around this?

Thanks,

Chinook
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You might try listing Drive0 in your bios as "None" and see if the F drive becomes C and boots. Obviously under this scheme you will not have access to the new drive to compare files.
 
Quote from max401:

You might try listing Drive0 in your bios as "None" and see if the F drive becomes C and boots. Obviously under this scheme you will not have access to the new drive to compare files.
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Max401,

You're a GENIUS :) It worked!!!! Thanks!!!

So now with a simple change in the BIOS settings, I can boot both drives! The good and puzzling thing is that I still have access to both C and F drives in the windows explorer! I'm not sure how this is happening but I'm not complaining :) As I mentioned earlier, my BIOS doesn't explicitly let F drive boot but this is a great workaround!

Chinook
 
Quote from chinook:

Max401,

You're a GENIUS :) It worked!!!! Thanks!!!

So now with a simple change in the BIOS settings, I can boot both drives! The good and puzzling thing is that I still have access to both C and F drives in the windows explorer! I'm not sure how this is happening but I'm not complaining :) As I mentioned earlier, my BIOS doesn't explicitly let F drive boot but this is a great workaround!

Chinook
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Interesting that you have access to both drives, I wouldn't think that would be possible as the bios would simply not allow it to be seen by the OS. Apparently XP is getting through to the disk and allowing it to be mounted.
 
Quote from max401:

Interesting that you have access to both drives, I wouldn't think that would be possible as the bios would simply not allow it to be seen by the OS. Apparently XP is getting through to the disk and allowing it to be mounted.
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I set the Disk0 to "None" and Disk1 to "Auto" in the BIOS. The master/slave jumper configurations are set to cable detect for both of the drives. I'm pleasantly surprised!

Chinook
 
Quote from chinook:

I set the Disk0 to "None" and Disk1 to "Auto" in the BIOS. The master/slave jumper configurations are set to cable detect for both of the drives. I'm pleasantly surprised!

Chinook
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Fantastic results. I'm glad you had it jumpered for "cable select;" I forgot all about the fact that you would have to change Drive1 to be the master or single drive under my idea (with normal jumpering i.e. slave and master). "Cable select" (I think) avoided that pitfall and may have allowed XP to see it. Gotta check with my disk guru and find out why this works!
 
Quote from nkhoi:

so now you just clone them to each other anytime you want.
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I now have two 80GB WB drives. The new one has 8MB buffer and old one has 2 MB. I'll use the new one as my boot drive and clone it weekly on the older drive. And I can boot either of them.

I had a dying hard drive in my old PC and I ended up wasting so much time reloading OS+programs+drivers thinking that there was some kind of program corruption. I went through this perhaps 6-7 times and learned my lesson! That's why I became obsessed with having two bootable drives.

By the way, it looks like I'll purchase Casper XP!

Chinook
 
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