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Hard drive clone info needed

Ickie

Ickie

SOH Administrator
a friend of mine has a HD making noise and wants me to install a new hard drive.
It has been a while since I have done this cloning, he has windows 7.
I need to know what program do i need to do this task?
His new drive will be a seagate.
what do i need to know about winders 7 and clonning
 
When I did a clone for my XP do to the same thing. I looked at all of the 3rd party free things but none worked. I ended up find a Western Digital clone program that worked fine and was free. I cloned a Maxtor to a new Western Digital. I don't know if the program I used would only let you clone to a Western Digital HD or not, nothing I saw said...

I would go to Seagate. It is like they have a program to cloning. He is what I found doing a quick seach.

http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/discwizard/
http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/201991en
 
Hello, all-

The last couple of time I bought hard drives (WD and Maxtor), they each came with a disk that had their own cloning utility included. I don't remember what the name was for the WD utility, but the one for Maxtor was called 'Maxblast'... I don't remember having problems with either one, however, at least on one occasion, my OS (XP Sp3 at the time) decided that my hardware had changed enough to require me to reactivate it again...

-Mike Z.
 
Free is nice but sometimes you get what you pay for...

For just a simple clone job some of those utilities are fine. On the other hand, I've used Acronis Disk Manager and/or True Image for years... and there's a lot of handy, supported stuff in the packages as well as multi-OS support

www.acronis.com
 
LIke Rob, I use Acronis TrueImage as my backup solution on my Winders rigs.
Works great and I've used it for hard drive migration a few times.

Otherwise, I'm a big fan of open-source goodies so I always keep a few assorted Linux Live-CDs floating around for utility work.
-PartedMagic is my favorite. It's got all sorts of goodies for working with drives and files. In particular, "partclone" is one utility I use on the disk. I also like to just plain use the "dd" command to clone disks.
-Ghost4Linux (G4L) is another good one to try. It's basically what it's name implies, it's a Norton Ghost type program excpet running on Linux.
 
Just want to throw in a thought. ALWAYS DO BACKUPS! Earlier tonight, I was playing an online game (EverQuest). It froze on me so I was forced to manually shut down the computer. When I tried to restart, the system started to go into windows, then a blue screen flashed and it shutdown. It was in a reboot loop. I have another broken laptop that is essentially the same specs as this one, so I swapped harddrives and was good to go albeit with a system that hadn't been updated in a year or so. When I loaded diagnostic programs, they all failed to see any files on the drive. There are some files I would dearly love to recover, but am at a loss as to how that might be accomplished. Afterwards, I will do a restore from the system DVD's, if I can find them...... Man, just two days ago I said to myself "you should back this up soon". But real life intervened.
 
You may be able to make the non booting drive into a slave drive than you can move the needed files to any place you like.
 
I tried booting off of a system CD, but while C shows, no files are there according to the system. It looks like the file allocation table is fubar. I seem to remember many years ago fixing this type of problem with a utility, but darn if I can remember what that utility was.

EDIT: WOOT! I was digging through my boxes of CD's and DVD's and found an earlier version of Hiren's BootCD. Loaded it up, chose one the the MBR utilities and voila, restored partition with all my files. Backing up now!!!!
 
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