Windows Cloning drive in Windows...

I am attempting to clone my girlfriends 640GB WD drive onto a 1TB F3 I have laying around. I've tried all manner of programs that are supposed to clone in one non-windows environment or another but every single one has failed. Acronis, the WD equivilent (which I think is the same thing), Clonezilla, Windows backup/restore. I think the problem that is arising is her motherboard has been a finicky, glitchy POS since day one and any time I make hardware changes (such as swapping out hard drives) it crashes, boot loops, and just generally freaks out.

So what I would like to try is cloning her hard drive within Windows on one of my spare machines (ie: boot the machine with its own hard drive while having her hard drive and the F3 connected). I can't seemt o find any cheap-as-free software that will clone a drive in Windows though. Anyone know of any or have any other suggestions about how I can get her running on the F3?

 

I've had good results with EaseUS Partition Master and the "Upgrade System Disk" option.

 

I installed it to check it out. It looks a lot like a tool I sometimes use called MiniTool Partition Wizard. Great little tool, but I don't see a way to clone a hard drive within the Windows environment. I need to be able to clone one non-system drive to another non-system drive (not just copy).

 

I found the windows built in backup tool worked well recently in W7 (I didn't even know it existed). Using the wizard you backup to an external drive, burn a bootable disc, put the new drive in, boot from the DVD and there's an option halfway through to restore from a backup.

 

I tried the build in backup/restore but it failed to successfully recover the system onto the new drive. All the programs that use DOS or other environments outside windows to clone the disc end up failing. That's why I would like to clone it within Windows on my spare machine then just pop the new disc in.

 

If all the options you've tried all fail are you sure there aren't dead sectors or errors on the existing drive that are causing this?

Doing it within windows just makes it harder, create a CloneZilla CD/USB and use the disk to local disk.

Plenty of tutorials on YouTube if you're not too sure what to do

 

I use HD Clone all the time, even for non standard disks like playstation 3, and it works everytime

 

I used the latest version of acronis a few weeks ago and it worked perfectly.

thats said an older version i had wouldn't work .

 

Is there any particular reason you have to do an online clone rather than an offline clone?

 

I would suggest CloneZilla for disk cloning - see this link

 

Because the motherboard of the system in question is ridiculously unstable. Any programs that try to operate outside the Windows environment end up crashing or failing. While messing with it the last time I ended up with a screen like this at one point:



Craig, I tried clonezilla several times already to no avail.

Rich, HDClone is one I hadn't tried yet. I've downloaded it but havn't gotten the chance to see if it'll do what I need it to but it looks more promising than any of the other thus far. Thanks for the suggestion!

 

What seemed to be wrong with CloneZilla? Another option is hooking both drives up to another PC and doing the disk-to-disk clone there, though if the root-cause issue is the motherboard, it may be worth just swapping it out and doing a clean install?

 

I don't mean to sound rude, but my original post was asking for programs to do just that (clone in Windows on a spare PC)

I would love to get rid of this board, since it'd been nothing but trouble since we got it. But financial obligations say that we have to keep it for the time being

 

Ah - my bad, serves me right for not reading!

 

no worries! Under any other circumstances CloneZilla would have probably worked just dandy, haha.

 

If you clone offline you can take the drive out of the unstable system and perform the clone on a stable PC... no problems with unstable hardware then?

 

I'm not sure what you're asking. I can't clone the drive in the system in question because anytime I start mucking about outside windows (in the BIOS or any environment that these cloning programs run), the system starts to crumble. It's actually fine as long as it's allowed to boot into windows and I don't touch any settings. It works every time just like it should in that case. But something as simple as plugging in the second drive sends it into fits of rage.

 

Take the HDD out of the system that 'starts to crumble' - I'll call this drive the "clone source" drive from now on.

The HDD you want to copy this data to will be known as the "clone destination"...

• On your second computer that is stable unplug power and sata from any drives that are connected to the system. This way there's no chance of wiping any of those drives
  
• Connect only the "clone source" and "clone destination" HDD's to the computer.
  
• Create a CloneZilla CD/USB and boot from this on the computer, it'll boot into Linux and you will be able to complete the clone.
  
• The "clone destination" drive will now mirror the "clone source" drive and can be put back into the original computer.

Make a brew and admire your work

 

For what it is worth I have had recently had to do this when upgrading a colleagues HDD. I bought the newest acronis when it came out and it works flawlessly. I would suggest (probably repeating what has already been said in the thread but it is a bit of a mess up there):

• Install both Original (Source HDD) and new (New HDD) into other stable machine.
• Boot that machine as normal
• Install/run acronis from within windows.
• Use its built in drive clone tool.
• **Optional extra is the buy the plus pack (think that is the right name) which allows restore to non identical hardware.
• Place New HDD back in unstable/old machine

Although it seems like a bit of an outlay now, Acronis really is worth it. I have used it everytime since it got recommended to me from here and it hasnt failed me yet.

Hope this helps.

Matt

 

This is actually brilliant. If the program RichCreedy suggested doesn't work I'm sure this method will and I'll end up doing that.

I havn't done anything yet because this is my girlfriends computer and I need to wait for an evening that she has to work in order to gain access to the machine

I will report back this weekend!