Morning, Just a quick one. Any recommendation on what to use to clone my vista 64-bit drive as its been sounding crunchy for some time now and defrags are no longer making it quiet? The drive is nice an secure so I know its not just a general rattle sadly but I don't really want to re-install the OS again as I just recently (1-2 months) did it. I know there is Ghost but I've been reading of issues with corrupted images so any other suggestions of apps you have used would be most appreciated
Recently, I've been using the GParted LiveCD for this type of thing. It offers much the same functionality as Partition Magic, but it's free/open-source software. So far, it has been very reliable for me.
Just (last night) cloned a XP setup (2 partitions) from an old 3.5" IDE to a new 160Gb IDE laptop drive using Clonezilla (also free/open-source) - worked like a charm and quick too.
No idea what you have been reading, but I've always used Ghost... for years and years and years.. never once had a problem with it, ever. Ghost isn't free of course, which is it's only drawback so far as I can tell. As above. Clonezilla works well.
Ok, I'll look into both. I guess the stuff I read about ghost was probably scaremongering. I'll check the prices on ghost and give Clonezilla a test and see how I get on realy. Cheers once again
I use ghost at work and it works great. I've used Acronis true image's trial version, and it worked well. You can use a linux live CD to do a complete disk copy (dd command) as well.
I ended up using Acronis True Image in the end and it cloned the drive just fine, partition tables and all. The problem however was that Vista wouldn't boot as it didn't recognise the partition maps because the actual brand of drive had changed. Popped the Vista install disc in the drive and chose to repair and it stated that it was going to repair the BCD menu system to fix the partition pointer. So I let it do its thing and rebooted and sure enough Vista booted straight up. Another problem was that Acronis, when copying the partition table, copied it in a percentile manner so what was a 3/4 disc size partition translated to 3/4 of a new larger (500GB vs 300GB) disc. I then used the built in Vista partition shrink utility in compmgmt.msc and re-sized the partition and extended the other (empty) one and it's all running nice. It'll probably need a de-frag to be on the safe side but the fact that its on a newer drive appears to be helping and it no longer sounds like it's going to explode which is nice
