Windows cloning a hard drive?

ok i want to take a copy of my computer to use as a back up as i will be installing some stuff and wiping the drive.


i'v tryed G4U which some of you might know of but it wont work with my laptop
sony vaio A397

do you know of anythink that will work or i could try?

thanks

 

if by this you mean making an image of your harddrive, then you could try the following.

Norton Ghost
Powerquest Desktop Proctector v2i (we use this at my work, it works really well)

 

Ghost is a very powerful util.

I used to use a program called DriveImage, which i think was made by powerquest, so that might be out of date by now. But driveimage was damn fast.

 

Just a word to the wise, I used ghost to try and copy a Drive with Xp Home on it to use as a backup incase the worst happened. When the worst did happen and I tried to use it to boot up the computer, ghost didnt copy the boot.ini file so I was screwed. Just thought i would share. I loved the old dos program drivecopy, it was a beast lol

 

which is why i love this v2i software we have at work, you save the image to a network share or NAS stick the cd into the pc that needs imaging it boots off the cd, point the program to the shares path and the image file name it sellf hit next a bunch of times and wait. We use it for imaging new pc's and our servers.

 

Dunno what version of ghost you were using, but its shouldnt have happened.

Versions 6,7 & 8 have been perfect for me. V8 is super lovely as its has full SATA support too

 

I tried ghost over a network and it would fail all the time and have to reinstall the pc the backup was on as well as it screwed up both pc's

 

i'v tryed v2i and its crap i want somethink like G4U which is a linux thing which you boot from CD and its free. we use that at work and its never failed over network it just does't work with my laptop

 

WinISO

 

making a small boot cd with linux for that sorta thing is silly (i'm guessing its a PCMCIA bus issue, i had that with G4U before deciding it wasn't worth the CD space in my holder.)

Try ghost, Try driveimage (again)

both can do network installs, most of the time restoration problems come from gemotry issues, if the partition is able to fit on without any problems, then normally you have no issues (i've never had any with either bits of software).

 

The reason why ghost didn't copy the boot.ini is because you didn't specify for it to do so I assume. there are switches you can add to the command line for running ghost if you want to or you can turn the options on while ghost is running..I don't know about older versions but in the newer ones you can check/uncheck like 20 or so available options prior to imaging. :-O