Saturday, April 9, 2011
Drive Cloning
The replacement hard disk for the Linux/Windows dual boot PC has arrived. I will be putting the new drive on through a USB connector so that I transfer the old drive's contents to the new one, then install the new one. There are a variety of freeware programs out there for doing the transfer from the old disk to the new one (a process known as cloning, because you have to get the boot sectors right). CloneMaxx looks attractive because it supposedly works with multiple partitions, not all of them Windows. Does anyone have experience (good or bad) with any of the freeware cloners?
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Who built your drives? If it was WD or Seagate (the two biggies) you can get their respective versions of Acronis Disk Image for free downloads. Seagate calls it DiskWizard, WD calls it Acronis True Image WD Edition. They work well and are pretty simple.
ReplyDeleteYou can do this all under an Ubuntu live CD using gparted and dd, too. That's the way I usually do it, but while that way is flexible and powerful, it's also running without safeties and a typo can wipe out your disk.
I have done it before just using the Linux native command dd.
ReplyDeleteHere is one of the many how-to articles:
http://undiff.com/2009/01/clone-a-drive-with-dd/
Thank you all!
ReplyDelete