Can I easily clone my HD?
Community Forums/General Help/Can I easily clone my HD?
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| I've just ordered a new 1tb HD as i'm running low on space on my current C drive. I really (really) don't want to reinstall Windows as my PC is setup just as I like it, so is there some free (and decent) software that will let me clone my C drive onto this new HD so I can use that as my main boot drive? |
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| Paragon Software have Hard Disk Manager Pro which has an option to migrate from 1 disk to another even if the HD's are from different manufacturers or of different sizes. http://www.paragon-software.com/uk/products.htm I tried some free software but it would stall or completely crash. Paragons HD Manager Pro though did the job with no problems. It's cheap and extremely powerfull. |
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| I've successfully used PING to clone HD's myself: http://ping.windowsdream.com/ Alternatively, you can use Junctions or symbolic links to move just part of your directory structure to a different drive. See the command-line tool mklink.exe that's part of Vista and Windows 7 for that. It can link a folder to another folder on a different drive, while it looks like they're still in the same location... So, for example, c:\games really redirects to d:\games instead, but as far as windows is concerned it's still where it used to be. |
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| I'd vote or Paragon Partition Manager. If you install Paragon Disk Manager or one of their similar products, it will allow you to save a bootable Partition Manager Disk, that can be burned to a CD too. You will then have to boot with it, it's got a DOS gui and as Amon said, it's pure power at your fingertipps. It can copy many things, including Harddrives and it's going to be a single task only, no Windows in the background, trying to lock, restore or whatever parts of your harddrive... |
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