I have to be honest with myself. I have some blind spots. I've been
involved with and building my own boxes since 1992 at least but making
backups that work has consistently failed. I've spent more money than I
want to remember on tape drives and various software over the years and
still the best way that I know to clone a drive is to try and fail.
Duplicating irreplaceable info on multiple drives and doing a fresh
install is the best I've come up with. Once in awhile doing a repair
install will do the trick. I've read the hardware review sites talking
about installing fresh dish images to compare hardrive speeds and I just
wish that I could do that on my own boxes. The most success I've had is
using a program called HD Clone but you always have to clone from a
smaller to a larger drive. Not perfect though because it screws up the
BIOS which then thinks the new drive is the old drive. I have no idea
why or if thats a consistent problem because I've only done it once on
my game box with an old 250 GB IDE to 500 GB SATA but if I switched the
BIOS to boot from the Seagate 500 Gigger it wouldn't boot. Change it
back to the old drive which was still installed for redundancy and it
booted fine with the 500 Gigger's Windows install. It must seem clear to
you by now that it may be more complicated than I can comprehend not
having taken a college course in it. It's just not user friendly and I
follow the instructions the best I can without success. Have you ever
used "DriveImage XML"? I used it years ago and made what I thought were
successful backups only to have them fail trying to reinstall them.
Years later just recently, I tried again to use this software and
reinstalled the Drive C image on the new disk only to be told that
NTLoader was missing or something to that effect. I ended up
reinstalling Windows 7 and reinstalling my games (not done yet by the
way). Believe me, I never want to go back because the best is yet to
come and I'll certainly be long gone by then but there has to be
something better than this. Appreciate the feedback.
Rick Glazier wrote:
From: "swzaske"
Dreading to install that new drive in my main machine because cloning
drives seldom works for me. Keep cool!
Cloning drives "always" works for me... (Going on 15 years without
a problem.)
What do you use?
I use Acronis (I've had 6 different versions so I must like it),
but for best results I always do a full physical spindle image,
file type, not forensic/(or sector)...
All partitions, the MBR, Track Zero, and partition tables.
I re-size later, when necessary, (and it is generally necessary
due to the new drive being larger...)
By doing it the "hard way" I don't make it simpler, but it always works.
Rick Glazier
