Hi everyone, I am looking for a tool that will copy the entire content of my hard drive to another location. The reason is that I want to upgrade my laptop with a new hard drive, the current one is running low on space, and i don't want to loose all my data. Oh and I run windows vista by the way. Hope anyone can help.
You want a drive imaging utility. I've used Norton Ghost before, but I don't know if it's any good compared to others.
If you where on a Mac, I'd say Carbon Copy Cloner. As you're a windows man, try some of the links here: http://alternativeto.net/desktop/carbon-copy-cloner/?platform=windows From that lot, this sounds your best bet: http://clonezilla.org/
Acronis Migrate Easy 7 I used a free trial version of their True Image Workstation that has done the job perfectly each time I've moved an install from one drive to another. Doesn't seem to be available anymore The Migrate Easy software is supposed to be easy to use though.
CloneZilla. Boot from the Live CD and choose "device-image" when prompted. Or my preferred method - use VMware convertor to P2V your old PC, and then run it as a virtual machine inside your new OS (or just grab the VMware development kit to mount the virtual hard drive file as a file in your My Computer) and extract the files you want afterwards. I did both this week converting my work laptop up to Windows 7 from Vista, and my last two PC upgrade/OS reinstalls have been supported by virtualising the old workstation, and indeed I'll virtualise my Win7 RC1 until I've got everything ported into my new Win7 Home Premium install
i use Acronis business edition but i get that through my job. so i can use it for whatever i want. its not free
don't people usually recommend driveimage xml in this circumstance these days (its free)? I always use ghost myself but not tested in anger on vista, 7 etc I got a 32 gig usb key and have ghost9 auto boot from it- 'drive to image' in your circumstance save image to the key..blast it where its supposed to go...been magic so far..prob doesn't work post vista tho.... general advice has always been to try and use a tool that doesn't operate from a live OS tho (does driveimage do this I'm not sure). Otherwise while you're doing it your registry will change and the image could be flawed or rubbished..... alternatively if your source and destination drives are the same size then a linux free cd and DD command can't be simpler....cant remember if DD will include the MBR or not, but if it doesn'tthat liveCD will also have partimage on for that if you need (me likey systemrescueCD)
