best tools for duplicating boot drive data ?

MM

after quite a bit google searching i figured i would ask here.

has anyone ever successfully duplicated ALL installed programs from an existing HDD to a new HDD ? i am talking about C drive only.

what software do you recommend for such cloning/duplicating etc. ?

greatly appreciate any suggestions, thanks!

passerby

You will want to look into drive re-imaging, it copies a whole drive as raw data into a file, that can be read back onto a new drive as raw data.

I have always done it by booting from a linux distro and using the DD command of unix to do this, but im pretty sure you can find a alternative for windows, or maybe use the windows install disc to do so. If your not familiar with linux and its command line.

Just google aobut how to create a disc image, im sure you will get some usefull stuff

hyrumark

I have had years of rock solid success using the free version of Macrium Reflect: http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx.

HDD Guru also has some really nice hard drive tools as well: http://hddguru.com/software/HDD-Raw-Copy-Tool/

Keep in mind for MOST of these types of imaging programs, your destination drive must be the same size or larger than the source drive.

thomasp

i second using linux's DD, just use knoppix - free, nothing to install, all you do is boot from a knoppix DVD or USB stick and get to it. you can clone partitions or entire harddrives and it will replicate them block by block exactly.

there is a graphical tool included in knoppix as well (GParted ?) to display all available partitions and you can read NTFS and FAT from linux to make sure you're not mixing up your partitions.

downside: only if you are scared of the command line.
if you want on-the-fly compression of disk images, things require more unix shell command experience, since you'd have to pipe the data stream from one command to the next to achieve that. all still possible though.

passerby

ya dd command is ultra simple just requires you use the command line, i would go with knoppix like thomasp said since it can boot directly off a disc or usb drive and requires no install and gives you access to dd.

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdb1

That would copy partition 1 of disk1 to partition 1 of disc 2

you can remove the numbers if you want to clone a whole disc instead of a partition, or you can give it a file location to dump and read the data from a file.

Before you start i would just double check in the fstab that you are using the correct drives.