HDD imaging advise

[Bludd]

I want to make an image of the partition I have Windows 7 x64 installed to. It is the boot partition and system partition, so I figure if I can make a perfect copy of it, I can recreate it on a new HDD I have coming. The one Windows is installed on now is kind of old and slow.

Do you have any advise? Any recommendations for free imaging software? Any help in general regarding this, I have never done this operation before.

 

[fbuffer]

good reading.. pick and choose really

http://www.thefreecountry.com/utilities/backupandimage.shtml
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/09/05/5-free-apps-to-clone-your-hard-drive/
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/08/clone-hard-drive-with-free-disk.html

I used to be a big Ghost user then moved to Acronis but had too many issues with them and external drives so now using ShadowProtect as far as pay to use goes.. for free I think there is a linux based "live-cd" that has a PartitionImage like clone that can copy/move entire drives and most hard drives now come with a utility that do the same, Seagate iirc includes a Seagate branded version of Acronis.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Do you have any advise? Any recommendations for free imaging software? Any help in general regarding this, I have never done this operation before.

Depending what drive you are getting, the manufacturers have their own copying utilities available for download for free. Certainly Seagate and Western Digital offer rebadged versions of Acronis that will quite happily clone a disk. Just plug the new one in, clone from the old one to the new one (make sure you choose the right source/destination disks), and then unplug the old disk.

Then I'd keep the old disk for a while (just in case), or wipe it with wiping software.

Acronis can be bought, but if you only do this sort of cloning thing once in a blue moon, the free versions are fine.

 

[Bludd]

Thanks guys. I will check those links out.

BZB, here's the real situation: Win7 is on a 35 GB partition on a 320 GB drive. The new disk is 2 TB. I don't want to clone the whole 320 GB drive, just the partition with Windows on it. Will those free manufacturer utils do that?

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Thanks guys. I will check those links out.

BZB, here's the real situation: Win7 is on a 35 GB partition on a 320 GB drive. The new disk is 2 TB. I don't want to clone the whole 320 GB drive, just the partition with Windows on it. Will those free manufacturer utils do that?

IIRC, they should do and will allow you to expand the partition if necessary. Download them and give them a look-see. They are just versions of Acronis without some of the more esoteric bells and whistles, but the basic backup/installation stuff is all there.

As long as you make sure not to delete the data off the old disk automatically after the clone, you can experiment with the new disk. For instance, you could just clone the whole disk, making the Win 7 partition to be what you want it to be, and if the software will only do a direct clone of both partitions, just delete the partitions you don't want afterwards.

Just install the software to your current disk, put the new drive in, and you can try various ways of cloning onto the new disk to find what you need. You can always wipe the new disk and start over if needed.

As I said, the only thing to be careful of is that you're always copying from the correct source disk to the correct target disk. If you're not paying attention, it's always possible to do it the wrong way around, despite the many requesters asking if you're sure you want to destroy everything on the target disk. It's not that it's easy to delete the old disk by accident, but it's easy to get confused and think you're copying over to the new disk when you're actually copying over to your old one. The different sizes should make them easy to tell apart, and just don't automatically wipe the old disk until you've had a chance to test the new one.

 

[Bludd]

Thanks for the info. Both the new and the old drives are WD so I think I will try the WD Arconis utility first.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Thanks for the info. Both the new and the old drives are WD so I think I will try the WD Arconis utility first.

I was using that myself a few weeks back, and it is simply a slightly cut down, rebadged Acronis. What I would suggest you do if you have the time, is to run the WD diagnostics across the drive drive first. If there are any problems with the drive, these will hopefully show it up before you start to use it in anger. Hard Drive Sentinel also has some good surface tests, such as "write then read" tests

I had an issue with a WD drive where everything was installed and looked good for the first month, but as more data was added to the drive, it hit a bad spot that the drive could not remap. As it was a system drive, I'd see intermittent system lockups whenever this "bad but un-remapable" block was accessed. The system would wait while the drive went off to do it's remapping and the drive would never come back. It ended up being replaced, and the replacement has been perfect.

However, this just goes to show that as drive manufacturers chase ever larger capacity drives, they are all suffering from worse quality control. It's cheaper just to replace or refurb drives that fail than to spend the extra money making them all 99.9 percent perfect. So while the disk is blank and not being used, it might be worth spending a day letting it run surface tests to make sure it's not going to cause problems in the future.

Ideally, you put the new drive in, but still boot off the old one. This way you can run tests and diagnostics on the new drive without it being a system drive at the same time. Then when you are happy it passes the tests, you clone the old drive to the new one.

 

[Vadi]

http://www.partitionwizard.com/
I used it to change the system partition in Win7 without problems.
Win7 has a built-in iso creator too I think. Maybe it wouldn't include user files, but some bakup tool like Areca Backup might be better for that.

 

[Bludd]

It worked fine. I used Paragon Backup and Recovery Free to make an image of the Win7 partition (1:1 sector clone of just that partition). I couldn't use the WD Arconis program because it wanted to clone the whole harddrive and I had mistakenly thought Windows was on a 320 GB drive, which I was keen to replace, but instead it was on a 750 GB drive so cloning all of that was out.

I had to align the cloned partition after I had restored it to the new drive because the new drive is an advanced format WD drive. Since I had used Paragon's imaging software, I thought their aligning program was nice too, so I used it. It did not work. It reported it had aligned the partition, but after running it twice and it not being aligned (running it after doing the align operation listed the relevant partition as un-optimally aligned) so I got the Arconis align util and it worked the first time.

One thing the Paragon imaging program did was assume I wanted to dual boot, so it created bcd stores for the new cloned partition which I did not want, so I had to clean that up and move boot manager and boot loader to the new partition.

So hit and miss, but I have it all working now.

 

[Davros]

wouldnt the cloning software clone the boot manager and boot loader from the old to the new ?

 

[Bludd]

wouldnt the cloning software clone the boot manager and boot loader from the old to the new ?

Yes, but the references were all wrong and it also updated the bcd store as I said.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Yes, but the references were all wrong and it also updated the bcd store as I said.

Then either it's not proper cloning software or you didn't do it correctly. I've cloned loads of drives with different software, and what you should end up with should be the same even down to boot loaders. The only difference should be for different partition sizes if you've set them manually or expanded them to fill larger disks.

I don't think you'd need a sector clone, as this usually would be for copying the contents of a drive (even the blank bits) to an identical drive. A normal clone with Acronis would by default offer to expand the drive to the newer size, and would only copy the files, not the raw sectors as well.

 

[Bludd]

When it restored, it assumed I was dual booting because I had not removed the original Win7 partition. I think it should have asked me if I was indeed dual booting before it updated the bcd stores and added another Win7 to the boot menu.

Still, it all worked out. I have learnt a lot from doing this.