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Hard drive ghosting
flak monkey - 11/6/09 at 05:55 PM

My laptop HDD is failing slowly.

What are the best free ghosting programs to get all the data off this one while its still working and transferred onto my new drive?

I dont have the winedoze installation disc for it you see....

Cheers,
David

graememk - 11/6/09 at 06:02 PM

xxclone for a live drive and its free

Keith Weiland - 11/6/09 at 06:02 PM

Ping

flak monkey - 11/6/09 at 07:43 PM

Thanks chaps.

So if i were to clone by drive onto my external USB HDD, how would I then get the contents onto my new drive?

Or does someone have a usb to 2.5" drive caddy I could borrow?

Cheers,
David

givemethebighammer - 11/6/09 at 08:46 PM

Disk images can be a bit funny to work with, restoring them can be dependent on matching disk geometries etc. Norton Ghost used to be OK but even that had issues. My first priority would be backing up the data before I tried anything. Windows disks aren't that hard to come by (cough) and as a legitimate user you are fully entitled to download a disk iso to use with your legal license key. Other options would be to boot a linux live cd and use the dd tool to copy the old disk to a new one.

this is a useful livecd

http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

http://www.joescat.com/backup/disk_image.html

40inches - 11/6/09 at 08:55 PM

I use Paragon Drive Backup every week to exactly copy the main drive,(that is, it makes a copy of the main drive that you can install in your PC and it will boot up without noticing you have changed the drive) it comes with an emergency recovery image you burn on to a CD, this has saved my bacon three times so far, why are 2.5" drives so crap

ironside - 12/6/09 at 08:08 AM

quote:
Originally posted by flak monkey
So if i were to clone by drive onto my external USB HDD, how would I then get the contents onto my new drive?


I use clonezilla, it's a free bootable CD and it will write to a USB hard disk.

So, you would boot from the clonezilla CD, copy your old drive to an image on your USB drive, replace your old drive, boot from the clonezilla CD again and restore the image from your USB drive to your new drive.