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Just bought a new HDD and want to clone my old ones contents over. I don't want to fork out money for Norton Ghost so I was wondering anyone know of a simliar program which is cheap or free? Only other one I have found so far is clonezilla. Also I don't want the old being used anymore except perhaps for manual backup once in a while. I replaced it cause it was noisy as fuck.

http://shsc.info/MovingWindowsToNewHardware (http://shsc.info/MovingWindowsToNewHardware)

 :drill:

edit: for the actual cloning, I've used a copy of ghost I've had for about a decade that's on a floppy. I think you might be able to get trial versions of Acronis or something now, though.

This article has reviews of various backup programs, including this freeone DriveImage XML (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2259185,00.asp). It takes a bit of computer savvy, but it is free.

Edit: It requires you to make a Bart PE boot ISO with elemtnes of driveimage xml embedded within it, since you're basically piggy-backing off of Bart to reimage your drive. If what I just said makes you go crosseyed, might not be the program for you.

I haven't yet tried this thing (https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=201099) but the blurb sounds good.  Unfortunately my drive seems to have died due to electronics failure and it often keeps my rig from booting.

Dam only one SATA cable  :tantrum:

Thanks for the tips I got the SATA cable installed and the new HDD working had to rip out the cage that they were contained in with a screwdriver cause it was causing rattle and have insulated it with rubber sealing (anyone know if this is a bad idea?). I used Acronis to clone the drive and when I try and boot up the new drive on its own Vista doesn't load fully not sure why?

Because Microsoft hates you.

OSX would boot right up without the dicking around you have to do to make imaging work with Windows. Don't mean to make it an OS war thread, but I fucking hate imaging windows drives and don't even bother anymore. I work on beating my time for speed installing windows.

Make sure that when you clone you are cloning the whole drive, not just the C partition. Otherwise you're skipping the mbr and the bootsector, and hence, vista won't launch. You might be able to fix this using the vista install CD and going to the repair function and poking about there.

Problem was Acronis gave me these options.

• As is - a new partition will be created for every old one with the same size and type, file system and label. The unused space will become unallocated.
• Proportional - the new disk space will be proportionally distributed between cloned partitions
• Manual - you will specify a new size and other parameters yourself

First time I chose "Proportional" this is what caused the problem. Just redid the clone using "As is" and it works perfect now really happy  ;D thanks for the tips.

Acronis is a sweet program, I hate anything assosciated with Norton so I was glad not to have to use Ghost. Plus I won't be doing this again for a long while so the trial version option is a winner.

Dam it worked too well I now have my new drive partitioned the same size as the old one so its not using its full capacity :S

Now that you mention it, I have had issues with doing proportional cloning with acronis as you did the first time around. I can't tell you why. Sometimes it works without a hitch, and sometimes it doesn't. Just today I did what you did on a WinXP disk and it wouldn't boot. I couldn't figure out why, but I think you just answered my question, unwittingly!

The proportional setting doesn't really work very well. Using as is I now have an exact clone of my old 320 GB HDD on the new 750 GB leaving 400 GB unallocated. I am formatting this as a new partition for storage so its worked out well.

In that situation I would use Partition Magic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PartitionMagic) to resize the partition on the fly. But the copy I own was made by PowerQuest. Symantec has since bought them out and probably added suck.

Partition Magic cannot resize certain types of partitions, the dynamic sort. The basic sort I believe it can.

BootIT NG is what I use for partition resizing.

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootit-next-generation.htm (http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootit-next-generation.htm)

I use the floppy version.

Nice tips here guys thanks, the partition thing actually works out nice cause I can use it for my page-filing.

http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page (http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page)

Has a program to do the same thing.  Also can boot into memtest and lots of other useful stuff.

That looks pretty good. I was using UBCD, but that looks easier and simpler.