clone a hard drive to an image file

jasonwatkins

is it possible ?

i only have a single SATA connection in my machine, so i need to clone one drive and write it out as an image file, then plug the other drive back in and then write out the image file back to the other drive.

I think Norton Ghost might do it but i'm not sure ..

cheers

Hammyman

Unless you've somewhere large enough to write the image file to, its a non-starter. The cloning software needs to run off a bootable device so that usually rules the DVD Writer out.

jasonwatkins

Well the drive I want to clone is 160gb and it has 4 partitions.

What i actually want to do is increase the size of one partition to something 200-250gb and then write out the increased sized image file.

I have a 400gb IDE drive as my main hard drive and I have 360gb free, so I would have more than enough space to write the image file to that drive if it can be done.

fwor

Clonezilla will write a complete drive to a compressed image file, but you still have to find somewhere to put it!

In your case I'd put the IDE drive in a USB caddy and save the image to that, then restore to the bigger drive, then move/resize the partitions with GPARTED.

Richie-from-the-Boro

What O/S are you trying to clone ?

mykeblack

If I were you, I'd just get a cheap USB external hard drive (you can pick them up for about £50 now off amazon for a 500GB version or for just over £60 you can get a 1TB external drive) then use norton ghost to create the image to the USB drive (it will probably take quite a long time to copy over, so you will probably need to leave it overnight) then copy back to the newer drive. You can then use the USB drive as a backup in case of disasters.

If all you want to do is increase the partition size, you might be able to do this using partition manager or something similar without having to copy any data off the drive if you have a lot of spare space.

DaftMule

If you have Windows 7 as your OS, you can create disk images with the built in backup utility.

The advice to get an external drive is good though. Apart from anything else, it's good to have as an independent backup location for you regular system backups...which everyone does of course

jasonwatkins

On my income, £50 quid is not really "cheap" i'm afraid.

fwor wrote: »

Clonezilla will write a complete drive to a compressed image file, but you still have to find somewhere to put it!

Well i might give it a whirl and see what happens - i've got more than enough space on the IDE drive to store the image.

Richie-from-the-Boro wrote: »

What O/S are you trying to clone ?

I'm not trying to clone an O/S - just the drive. I want to swap out the drive with a bigger one, and just retain what's on the smaller drive.

mykeblack

Hi sorry, by 'cheap' I meant much cheaper than they used to be a year ago when a 500gb drive would have cost several hundred pounds.

If you want a really cheap way of storing/transferring the data, you could consider creating a split zip file using something like winzip which will archive the data into separate DVD sized files, then you copy the files on to separate DVDs. Should cost you less than a fiver for 10 DVD-R discs. If the data can be compressed down, you might actually fit it all on 2 or 3 DVDs which would be even cheaper and quicker to do.

I use this method to create snapshots of my email .pst files in case the email database gets corrupted and I need to restore them.

jasonwatkins

I might try that. With the way the original drive is partitioned up though, i'm not so sure it will work but it might be worth a punt ..

gaming_guy

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