Hard Light Productions Forums

Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: TrashMan on June 15, 2006, 08:04:47 am

Title: Disk Copy
Post by: TrashMan on June 15, 2006, 08:04:47 am

Teh title sez it all..

I'm looking for a program that directly copies the whole HDD to another one - EVERY SINGLE BIT.
Anyone know one?

Title: Re: Disk Copy
Post by: Shade on June 15, 2006, 08:08:59 am

What you need is a HD cloning program. HDClone (http://www.miray.de/products/sat.hdclone.html) is one, and there is a free basic version available.

Title: Re: Disk Copy
Post by: Prophet on June 15, 2006, 08:55:03 am

Norton Ghost is one option...

Title: Re: Disk Copy
Post by: Turambar on June 15, 2006, 09:11:54 am

but its norton, so go for HDClone.

norton= good at marketing, bad at everything else

Title: Re: Disk Copy
Post by: Colonol Dekker on June 15, 2006, 10:10:07 am

Norton could be gordon freemans dad..............

Title: Re: Disk Copy
Post by: Geezer on June 15, 2006, 12:40:14 pm

Try Acronis TrueImage.

Title: Re: Disk Copy
Post by: perihelion on June 15, 2006, 04:38:21 pm

I recommend a combination of Bart PE (a windows pre-installation environment boot CD) with DriveImage XML.  It is a bit more complicated in that you have to build the boot CD, but it is free and can handle just about any hardware configuration.  If you are using a RAID or other special controller, you may have to make sure you install the drivers when you build the Bart PE CD, but that's not hard.

Not as simple as the purchased off-the-shelf solutions like Acronis, but it has the advantage of being (legally) free.  The only catch is you need a windows XP SP2 install CD to build the Bart PE CD.

I'm assuming in all of this that you are using an M$ operating system.  If not, nevermind.

Title: Re: Disk Copy
Post by: TrashMan on June 15, 2006, 05:27:30 pm

I got HDClone :D

Tomorrow I'm gonna try the old disk copy procedure and their attempt a repair on the copy with TestDisk...

Title: Re: Disk Copy
Post by: Descenterace on June 16, 2006, 06:12:49 pm

And the funny thing is that Linux has a utility installed by default that will do this quite happily.

dd if=[source] of=[dest]