Markus

Hello All,
Not been around today as I've had the "joy" of installing a new HD in the iMac and restoring the data from a backup.

Anyway, onto the real question I need an answer for. The future Mother-In-Law's hard drive is very short on disk space, so I've got a nice new 320GB drive to slam into it. Ideally what I want to do is to clone the existing drive (it's actually partitioned into two, C: being the system drive with most of the apps on it, and D: being a data volume, but I believe some apps have been installed there too, but I could be wrong) onto the nice new drive, still having two partitions though.

The question is, how to do this, more specifically, what software should I use. If it were a Mac I'd use either Disk Utility to restore the drive, or make an image and restore that back, or I'd use NetRestore Helper (part of the NetRestore package) or Carbon Copy Cloner. But we're not talking Mac's here, we're talking PC's.

The first thing that pops into my mind is Norton Ghost. I'm not sure if that is any good or if it will do what I want, so I need advice on what software to use, preferably free (be it truly free, or kinda free, if you get my drift *cough* ), and also advice on how best to approach this.

Anyone know if Ultimate Boot CD for Windows has something on it that would allow me to boot from the CD, then image from the existing drive to the new drive?

mike1210

Markus, are these drives the same make per chance? If so some of the free tools off the manufactor websites may do the trick. Acronis True Image and Ghost are paid for options that are often used

If it were me I'd weigh up the fresh build vs clone options depending on how much software was installed how big will the image be etc

If it's bogged down with unwanted stuff a fresh build may give it a lease of life

Be weary of a straight cloan with different make hard drives, may crash on boot due to the mass storage drivers being different for each hard drive but it's unlikely

UBCD has cloaning tools check the list under disk tools

UBCD for Windows

spectrum48k

Alternatives to Norton Ghost (Imaging / Cloning programs)

Markus

Thanks for the replies so far.

As for disk makes, the new one will be a Western Digital, as for the existing drive, to be honest I'm not sure what brand it is.

It's a very valid point about clean build vs cloning, and I'll have a think about it. I don't think there are many apps on the machine, it's mostly data.