Zugg Software :: View topic - Bit of an off-topic question

Posted: Wed Oct 22, 2008 10:44 am

but this is the most technically-minded forum I frequent, so I figured I'd ask here.

I have almost 2TB of storage spread across quite a few discs. Some of these discs are pushing it now - 5+ years old - and I really don't want to lose the data on them. Putting that data on a newer disc is the easiest way, I think. Easy task, right? Trouble is that one of these discs is the system and boot partition, so backing it up would mean reinstalling windows, which sucks.

The two drives I want to back up are 250GB each, but I have a blank 750GB ready to install, so space isn't an issue. My question is this: is there a way to copy, absolutely verbatim everything from those two discs onto the new one? So I can just run this util, whatever it might be, then unplug the old two drives and it'll still boot into the same Windows absolutely fine. Any other suggestions about ways to go about this are welcome. Commercial software isn't an insurmountable obstacle - I'm sure I can con work into buying it for me ;) - but I'd rather not have to cash in any favours with the IT guys if I don't have to.

This'll also come in handy when I (eventually - honest) start using RAID instead of a whole mess of discs, but that's a way off.

Wizard Joined: 11 Jul 2002 Posts: 1265 Location: USA

Before any suggestions a question. Is this boot disk Windows XP or Vista?

If it is XP just clone it using Ghost or equivilant. Check out this site.

http://www.thefreecountry.com/utilities/backupandimage.shtml

Once you have proven that you have a good working copy of the boot disc then you can copy more things onto that partition, or another on your new drive.

Apprentice Joined: 18 Feb 2007 Posts: 190

actually new thing popped out month ago http://odin-win.sourceforge.net/
its 0.1beta tho Razz

albeit, i always had much success with beta software other than cmud

if not, symantec ghost or any other disk cloning utility to your liking

you can make verbatim clone by booting linux of cd or usb and using dd... however, its low level tool and i very much doubt windows will swallow such copies, you need some lba transcription done for that me thinks

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

You're thinking about making an image, I haven't seen the site Arminas linked but that's the route you want to go. Let me know if you find a good free utility that makes a windows image Razz

My school uses them to customize the laptops to our standards, but I think they use a program they paid for from Symantec called Ghost.

Posted: Wed Oct 22, 2008 3:01 pm

Ultimate Boot CD
http://ubcd.sourceforge.net/

Plenty of free imaging tools on that!

Wizard Joined: 14 Aug 2004 Posts: 1269

GParted-Clonezilla
http://gpartedclonz.tuxfamily.org/index.php
Although they haven't released a version for a bit. I used GParted to resize my Vista partition (took several hours but worked fine). Clonezilla can clone partitions. There are separate projects with newer versions of both pieces of software. Both free. Should be able to clone a disk onto a partition on the new disk...