Hard drive Cloning?

[bigdaddylee82]

Hello all,

I'm new the forum, but have benefited from Revision3 shows and info for a while now.

I'm in search of a good hard drive cloning program. I'm upgrading and need to clone my existing hard drive to my new one. Google search seems to show that Acronis True Image and Norton Ghost are my best options, but they cost money. The free applications I have found are mostly trials that are limited in features and have slow transfer rates (according to their reviews anyway). So, any suggestions? I'd prefer free, but if I have to buy it I guess I will. Thanks in advance.


-Lee

[sonofdad]

I have always used Ghost for my cloning, its included in Hirens boot disk with a bunch of other tools and utilities, you can find it on the torrents pretty easy.

[slonkak]

dd and possibly nc

If you have some bootable linux cds lying around (which you should), you can use them. I have knoppix cd's for data recovery purposes and they will work here too. If you're going to a completely separate machine, boot both of them with a knoppix cd, plug a crossover ethernet cable between them, configure the nics:

Source machine:

ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.1 netmask 255.255.255.0


Target machine:

ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.2 netmask 255.255.255.0


Start the netcat listener on the machine that is your target (assuming knoppix sees your hard drive as hda):
nc –l –p 7000 | dd of=/dev/hda

Then on the source machine:
dd if=/dev/hda | nc 192.168.1.2 7000

----------------------------------
If you can plug both hard drives into the same machine, then it's simple:

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb


If your hard drive has bad blocks, you may need to add this line as the last argument to the dd command:

conv=sync,noerror


Hope this helps!

[nmayotte]

I've imaged with knoppix using dd as well. The only difference is that I typically do it to ~12 machines at once. If you boot the host machine into knoppix run knoppix-terminal server and then have all the clients boot via pxe and use a similar dd command to copy it to each of them. The only problem between this route versus ghost/acronis is that dd is a sector by sector approach, so if it's a 500gb hard drive with a 15 gig install of winxp on it, it will still have to copy 500gb's. Ghost and acronis can make an image thats only 15 gb.

You can also check out g4u - http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/ It's a free suite that does disk cloning. I've heard good reviews of it, but have no direct experience using it.

[bigdaddylee82]

Thanks Sonofdad, and everyone else for the advise. I found a working copy of the latest version of Hiren's Boot Disk. What an amazing tool! I guess it shows what I know huh? This thing is loaded with tons of useful resources. I wish I had known about it years ago. I used Norton Ghost and had a new clone of my hard drive in about 2 hours. Thanks again for the tip Sonofdad.

-Lee