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What is some good HDD cloning software?


Bill

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What is some good HDD cloning software?

One of my friends is having the same problems with his HDD in his desktop that I was having on my laptop, and for those that kept up you can pretty much guess that he is not having any fun right now.

For those that don't know what I am talking about, his PC is not booting up everytime anymore, and his Hard disk drive is only being recognized part of the time, and Dell is sending him a new free 120 GB HDD.

I will go over there with my external drive(s), and my USB to IDE cable and get to work on it, so does anybody have any suggestions for free HDD cloning software or back up software or whatever?

If we can't clone his HDD he is pretty much screwed because Dell never gave him an XP reinstall disk, atleast according to him they didn't, I don't think he is one to lose stuff though. (probably Dell's fault, I have the same desktop as him and mine came with a broken DVD-ROM drive, Dell has straightened up their act though, I think)

Any usefull info or just links would be appreciated.

Bill

Edit: Just got off the phone with him. The guy has a Win XP CD, so we will do a full re-install, and I will probably just copy documents, and music and stuff from his old HDD to my external.

The only bad thing is Dell will take his old HDD on Wednesday when they guy replaces the old one, so I kinda have to get their either today or tomorrow to back up all his music and stuff. (he runs/leads a band, and so forth)

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Norton Ghost (2003 or later) works great! I understand there's a freeware (or shareware) one available somewhere, but I've never used it.

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I would recommend PowerQuest DriveImage 5 or 6 (2002) with DOS BootDisks. In DOS it's still really fast on Intel Chipsets. Though, if you clone, bad files will also be broken on the new disk. Don't know how it handles external USB devices. I think there is support in PQ DI 6

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Also, there's Casper XP. I know some people who claim Norton Ghost didn't work for them, but Casper worked flawlessly. Casper is $50 online, which I think is cheaper than Ghost.

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Symantec Ghost 8.2, man, the good old DOS version. :)

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Casper XP & Acronis TrueImage are my favorites...

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  • 3 weeks later...

Cancel my previous recommendation for Norton Ghost. It's always worked fine for me until this time. However I've spent the last 24 hours fighting to get it to clone my failing drive. Not only was the process taking around five HOURS to complete, it was consistently failing about three hours into the process.

Out of frustration, I sprang for the $50 (US) for Casper XP and a half-hour later the entire cloning process was complete! None of Norton's foolish rebooting into DOS either... Just copy and switch. I can't believe how much better Casper is.

:)

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Norton Ghost 9.0 which is really PowerQuest DriveImae and also Acronis TrueImage.

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