Free Hard Drive Cloner

alanrowell

Upgrading the hard drive on my netbook (note no DVD drive) so I want something that will do an image copy of the whole drive - including all partitions and recovery area.

I've downloaded a few but they are all set up to perform logical drive to logical drive copy so there's no way of copying the recovery area.

So any suggestions?

Browntoa

if its seagate or maxstor then there are free tools on their web site , will clone to USB

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=DiscWizard&vgnextoid=d9fd4a3cdde5c010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD

alanrowell

Copying from a Hitachi drive to Samsung drive.

gaming_guy

Clonezilla should do the lot in one go for you (inc recovery partitions)

Just use Unetbootin to install it to a USB flash drive & boot the netbook from the USB drive to run clonezilla

JasX

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_disk_cloning_software

Linbox

Ghost will do it, copy drive to drive

Freebyman

giveaway of the day are doing a free program that might help called paragon - drive copy 10 special edition.

Heres the link

http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/

But you have to download and install before 8am tomorrow.

daniel_owen_uk

Absolutely 100% Gparted

Put it on a disk, keep it in your essential software wallet for future use.

tronator

alanrowell wrote: »

Upgrading the hard drive on my netbook (note no DVD drive) so I want something that will do an image copy of the whole drive - including all partitions and recovery area.

I've downloaded a few but they are all set up to perform logical drive to logical drive copy so there's no way of copying the recovery area.

So any suggestions?

The good old Linux "dd" (disc dump) will do it. dd will copy sector by sector of one hard disk to another. For that you'll need Ubuntu on a USB stick and a USB caddy for the new hard disk.

A bootable Ubuntu on a USB stick can be easily created on an existing Ubuntu installtion (System -> Administration -> Startup Disc Creator) or with Unetbootin. The new hard disk should be bigger than the old one and the USB caddy should be connected to a USB2 port, otherwise it will take forever.

Then you boot Ubuntu and start a terminal. First assure yourself which one is the old and which one is the new one

sudo fdisk -l

Since the USB stick is most likely /dev/sda, your hard disks should be /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc. Make sure the two hard disk are not mounted

sudo umount /dev/sdb*
sudo umount /dev/sdc*

After you double checked again which hard disk is wich run this command

dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc bs=4k

The old hard disk should be after if= and the new one behind of=

The dd command will give you no output if everything goes right. If you want to see the progress open a second terminal and run

pkill -USR1 ^dd$

or if you want to see it every 5 seconds

watch -n5 -- pkill -USR1 ^dd$

Once dd finished, you need to resize the partition(s) of the new hard disk to use the unused space. You can do it in Ubuntu too with GParted (System -> Administration -> GParted)

Browntoa wrote: »

if its seagate or maxstor then there are free tools on their web site , will clone to USB

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=DiscWizard&vgnextoid=d9fd4a3cdde5c010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD

Does it run from a USB stick? Didn't find it in the manual...

Lokolo

Browntoa wrote: »

if its seagate or maxstor then there are free tools on their web site , will clone to USB

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=DiscWizard&vgnextoid=d9fd4a3cdde5c010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD

WD also have one but I don't have the link handy.

candtalan

gaming_guy wrote: »

Clonezilla should do the lot in one go for you (inc recovery partitions)

Just use Unetbootin to install it to a USB flash drive & boot the netbook from the USB drive to run clonezilla

I have used it successfully. To include the MBR also, which is useful, be careful to read the response options carefully before hitting return key. At the relevant stage I think it asks for a Y (upper case y) and I believe the first time I used it I only used lower case y and on that occasion the MBR was not included.
At the time I could not understand why, but on a later occasion I got it correct. I worked well.