clone a hard drive to an image file

tronator

Hammyman wrote: »

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.

Why? There are bootable USB sticks. Some people also have more than one CD/DVD drive.

Even if you haven't one of the above, Norton Ghost can write to CD/DVD for ages. It's also not a problem that you have only one drive, you just boot from the Ghost CD and once the program is loaded you can remove it...



These days partitions are (much) bigger than 4GB so splitting the image across several DVDs is not really feasible. The best way would be to use an external USB hard disk and write the image to it.

Richie-from-the-Boro

jasonwatkins wrote: »

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

- see #5 & #8

- you are trying to clone an O/S, unless all of the drives your cloning does not have an O/S on it, your question was which backup software should you use .. .. wasn't it ?

- which propriety imaging software such as ghost / acronis / etc you use is determined by which O/S you will need to restore/backup/clone to a~n~other drive

- all the XP version of windows are easy regardless of service packs and can be cloned with almost any product. Win7 is a different kettle of fish altogether, make sure the product has Win7 accreditation.

jasonwatkins

the drive i want to clone doesn't have an O/S on it, but it does have stuff on it.

fwor

Richie-from-the-Boro wrote: »

Win7 is a different kettle of fish altogether, make sure the product has Win7 accreditation.

Interesting - I wasn't aware that Win7 was in any fundamental way different. What makes it so? An unusual filesystem? A new format for the MBR?

jasonwatkins

all done. just went for broke and cloned the drive to my main system drive and deliberately overwrote it (after backups of course).

"re-cloned" it back out to the smaller drive using the "auto" option and everything was adjusted accordingly and it's all good - all works.

just need to get windows to find my IDE drive now, as well as the SATA one, as it seems to have lost it ..