Hard Disk Copy
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The hard disk on my home PC is making rather strange noises and I suspect it may be about to fail. I have of course (fairly) up to date backups of my data but I'd like to make a copy of the disk onto a newer, larger one to avoid having to reinstall all the software. There seem to be plenty of utilities out there but I've no experience with any of them - anyone tried this?
Apathy Rules - I suppose...
Its not the things you fear that come to get you but all the things that you don't expect
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The hard disk on my home PC is making rather strange noises and I suspect it may be about to fail. I have of course (fairly) up to date backups of my data but I'd like to make a copy of the disk onto a newer, larger one to avoid having to reinstall all the software. There seem to be plenty of utilities out there but I've no experience with any of them - anyone tried this?
Apathy Rules - I suppose...
Its not the things you fear that come to get you but all the things that you don't expect
Steve_pqr wrote:
but I've no experience with any of them - anyone tried this?
pretty regularly. After a bad experience with Western Digital wiping out the partition on my Maxtor boot disk while installing a new disk on an existing system without a backup (yeah, yeah, not the brightest thing I ever did).... I tend to play favorites. Drive Image XML has yet to fail me other than it wants UAC turned off in Vista. http://www.runtime.org/dixml.htm[^]
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
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The hard disk on my home PC is making rather strange noises and I suspect it may be about to fail. I have of course (fairly) up to date backups of my data but I'd like to make a copy of the disk onto a newer, larger one to avoid having to reinstall all the software. There seem to be plenty of utilities out there but I've no experience with any of them - anyone tried this?
Apathy Rules - I suppose...
Its not the things you fear that come to get you but all the things that you don't expect
Try Acronis True Image.
Mostly, when you see programmers, they aren't doing anything. One of the attractive things about programmers is that you cannot tell whether or not they are working simply by looking at them. Very often they're sitting there seemingly drinking coffee and gossiping, or just staring into space. What the programmer is trying to do is get a handle on all the individual and unrelated ideas that are scampering around in his head. (Charles M Strauss)
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Try Acronis True Image.
Mostly, when you see programmers, they aren't doing anything. One of the attractive things about programmers is that you cannot tell whether or not they are working simply by looking at them. Very often they're sitting there seemingly drinking coffee and gossiping, or just staring into space. What the programmer is trying to do is get a handle on all the individual and unrelated ideas that are scampering around in his head. (Charles M Strauss)
I'd second that, it's already save my bacon on a few ocassions, not a perfect product but it does what you need when you need it to which is as they say worth it's weight in gold.
Nothing is exactly what it seems but everything with seems can be unpicked.
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The hard disk on my home PC is making rather strange noises and I suspect it may be about to fail. I have of course (fairly) up to date backups of my data but I'd like to make a copy of the disk onto a newer, larger one to avoid having to reinstall all the software. There seem to be plenty of utilities out there but I've no experience with any of them - anyone tried this?
Apathy Rules - I suppose...
Its not the things you fear that come to get you but all the things that you don't expect
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Thanks - I'll check those out...
Apathy Rules - I suppose...
Its not the things you fear that come to get you but all the things that you don't expect
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The hard disk on my home PC is making rather strange noises and I suspect it may be about to fail. I have of course (fairly) up to date backups of my data but I'd like to make a copy of the disk onto a newer, larger one to avoid having to reinstall all the software. There seem to be plenty of utilities out there but I've no experience with any of them - anyone tried this?
Apathy Rules - I suppose...
Its not the things you fear that come to get you but all the things that you don't expect
Steve_pqr wrote:
and I suspect it may be about to fail.
It already failed, what looks like data to your computer is actually it's last wish. The easiest way I found is to take an intern who is raving about linux, and tell him to copy it. Failing that, we've been caught using Acronis TrueImage (because we have a copy here), though you have to make an "intermediate" image.
We are a big screwed up dysfunctional psychotic happy family - some more screwed up, others more happy, but everybody's psychotic joint venture definition of CP
blog: TDD - the Aha! | Linkify!| FoldWithUs! | sighist -
Steve_pqr wrote:
and I suspect it may be about to fail.
It already failed, what looks like data to your computer is actually it's last wish. The easiest way I found is to take an intern who is raving about linux, and tell him to copy it. Failing that, we've been caught using Acronis TrueImage (because we have a copy here), though you have to make an "intermediate" image.
We are a big screwed up dysfunctional psychotic happy family - some more screwed up, others more happy, but everybody's psychotic joint venture definition of CP
blog: TDD - the Aha! | Linkify!| FoldWithUs! | sighistpeterchen wrote:
The easiest way I found is to take an intern who is raving about linux, and tell him to copy it.
:laugh: :laugh: :laugh:
If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality. A mental illness, maybe - but not a personality. - Charlie Brooker My Photos/CP Flickr Group - ScrewTurn Wiki
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The hard disk on my home PC is making rather strange noises and I suspect it may be about to fail. I have of course (fairly) up to date backups of my data but I'd like to make a copy of the disk onto a newer, larger one to avoid having to reinstall all the software. There seem to be plenty of utilities out there but I've no experience with any of them - anyone tried this?
Apathy Rules - I suppose...
Its not the things you fear that come to get you but all the things that you don't expect
-
The hard disk on my home PC is making rather strange noises and I suspect it may be about to fail. I have of course (fairly) up to date backups of my data but I'd like to make a copy of the disk onto a newer, larger one to avoid having to reinstall all the software. There seem to be plenty of utilities out there but I've no experience with any of them - anyone tried this?
Apathy Rules - I suppose...
Its not the things you fear that come to get you but all the things that you don't expect
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Steve_pqr wrote:
and I suspect it may be about to fail.
It already failed, what looks like data to your computer is actually it's last wish. The easiest way I found is to take an intern who is raving about linux, and tell him to copy it. Failing that, we've been caught using Acronis TrueImage (because we have a copy here), though you have to make an "intermediate" image.
We are a big screwed up dysfunctional psychotic happy family - some more screwed up, others more happy, but everybody's psychotic joint venture definition of CP
blog: TDD - the Aha! | Linkify!| FoldWithUs! | sighist*Cringe* I can't think of a worse way to assure your hardware finishes failing before it's completed.
Otherwise [Microsoft is] toast in the long term no matter how much money they've got. They would be already if the Linux community didn't have it's head so firmly up it's own command line buffer that it looks like taking 15 years to find the desktop. -- Matthew Faithfull
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*Cringe* I can't think of a worse way to assure your hardware finishes failing before it's completed.
Otherwise [Microsoft is] toast in the long term no matter how much money they've got. They would be already if the Linux community didn't have it's head so firmly up it's own command line buffer that it looks like taking 15 years to find the desktop. -- Matthew Faithfull
The linux guy? It's just my experience. YMMV :D Or Acronis? (Or course, you have to put the image on a different disk, which is a pain)
We are a big screwed up dysfunctional psychotic happy family - some more screwed up, others more happy, but everybody's psychotic joint venture definition of CP
blog: TDD - the Aha! | Linkify!| FoldWithUs! | sighist -
The hard disk on my home PC is making rather strange noises and I suspect it may be about to fail. I have of course (fairly) up to date backups of my data but I'd like to make a copy of the disk onto a newer, larger one to avoid having to reinstall all the software. There seem to be plenty of utilities out there but I've no experience with any of them - anyone tried this?
Apathy Rules - I suppose...
Its not the things you fear that come to get you but all the things that you don't expect
If you want a free utility that works. Grab a copy of sysrescuecd [^] (or any linux livecd) and use dd to copy the entire disk. Something like.
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=1M
However first make sure you got the correct drives
fdisk -l
What this does is make a byte for byte copy of the entire drive. At work I have done this dozens of times with windows and linux systems. If you want something automatic. I recommend Acronis True Image. You can get a fully functional demo to do the job as well.
Last modified: 19mins after originally posted --
John
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The hard disk on my home PC is making rather strange noises and I suspect it may be about to fail. I have of course (fairly) up to date backups of my data but I'd like to make a copy of the disk onto a newer, larger one to avoid having to reinstall all the software. There seem to be plenty of utilities out there but I've no experience with any of them - anyone tried this?
Apathy Rules - I suppose...
Its not the things you fear that come to get you but all the things that you don't expect