what program do you guys use to clone your HD? I happened to snag a 1.5TB samsung drive from newegg for $80, killer deal. Right now my main drive is an older SATA (not the 3GB/s) 300GB Seagate, and i'd like to clone that drive to my new samsung, so i can take full advantage of my 7200RPMs and full 3GB/s SATA transfer, however most of the cloning programs I've tried have required me to make a boot DISK, I do not have a floppy and if I need to have some sort of bootable removeable media, I can use a USB flash or bootable CD. Any ideas? I'd prefer the program be freeware

 

I use Norton Ghost, not freeware, but you might be able to find it on the interweb

 

I've cloned a few hard drives perfectly using norton ghost. I have an Ultimate Boot CD that has Ghost on it. I can upload the boot CD ISO for you and you can burn yourself a copy. It's pretty easy to do.

 

that would be wonderful. it's win7 x64 compatible?

i'm A+ certified but i got it back in 2001 and got out of the IT field so i'm a bit rusty

 

I just did that this weekend. I used Norton Ghost 15.0 to clone my 350 GB to a 1 TB I bought.

Upon first startup, Windows 7 locked me at a plain blue screen that said it wasn't genuine. I couldn't do anything, not even from a command window.

I looked online for some tips, but didn't find anything successful, so I formatted and spent the rest of the weekend reinstalling.

I would say I'm a power user. I've been using PCs since DOS. There is probably a solution, but to caution you that cloning over isn't exactly straight forward anymore.

 

It's a WinPE boot CD so it doesn't load windows 7. It's NTFS compatible if that's what you're asking yes.

I'm uploading it now and I'll post the link when it's done.

 

not a freeware but it works flawless Acronis True Home Image. I always keep a cloned drive on the side in case i run into any problems or errors.

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/

 

bittorrent hiren's boot cd

it has the cloning tools that you need

 

 

^ What they said.

 

 

Aww , here come the robot freaks...

 

Here's the link

http://depositfiles.com/files/xg6rt61jr

download that ISO and burn it. Then boot from it, then hit start, go to programs, disk utilities and you should see norton ghost. Open ghost 32. You may want to go to options first and check the box that says don't cancel transfer due to bad block. Then choose from disk and to disk. the source disk will be the one with the smaller block numbers and destination will be the one with larger block numbers. By default it will expand the partitions but keep the same ratio that they had on the old disk.

 

Most HD's come with disk cloning software in the box.

 

Etch-A-Sketch

 

Acronis.

+1 on Hiren's BootCD....its a must have.

 

thanks stunna, i'm downloading ISO now, i'll try it once i get it burned. thanks for all the suggestions guys.

@whiskers, most do come with software i know maxtor and WD usually do, but this was samsung and it was only $80 for 1.5TB, and didn't come in a samsung box, so you get what you pay for. but i know the drive works that's all that matters.

 

$80 for 1.5TB!

 

yes....
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822152175

they had a sale going on where you type in the promo code and get an extra $10 off which brought it to $79.99, then it was free shipping

 

so i follow your directions to a T, and do disk to disk cloning, i select the 300gb as the source and the 1.5tb as the destination then it gives me the error, "destination drive too small (40011)" both partitions are NTFS. any ideas?

 

hmmm I wonder if that version of is not compatible with disks that large.

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT...99113007224925

 

This Hirens boot disc has a newer version of norton ghost. try using that.

http://www.hirensbootcd.net/download.html

 

looks like it's taking it, so now i play the waiting game, 1:37 hours to go haha thanks #1Stunna.

while we are waiting, i'm having issues with high electricity bills, (last one was $454), the HVAC guy came over the other day and found a problem with my reversing solenoid in my heat pump which makes it work twice as hard, but during this fiasco i looked at the meter while computer was running, then turned it off and saw the meter slowed down significantly. now i know the computer isn't the sole issue with the high power bills, but it concerns me. I have an ANTEC 400W PSU i purchased in 2003 (it's old, it doesn't even have SATA power plugs, i have to get molex to SATA adapters haha) i was wondering, i saw a 650W PSU from Antec on newegg going for $70, and it was talking about how it had reduced power consumption. would you reccommend i replace my PSU to see if that reduces power consumption? I'm running a core 2 quad socket 775 i believe and gigabyte motherboard.

 

A 650w power supply is overkill unless you're running SLI or crossfire. 400w would be fine and in fact probably more efficient than a 650w. Power supplies efficiencies increase as the load increase. So a 400w power supply providing 300w of power will be more efficient than a 650w PS providing 300w of power. Get one of the 80+ plus rated PS as they have an efficiency rating of 80% or higher.

PCs use much less power than people think



My desktop is using less than 60w or in Apple marketing speak less power than a lightbulb. It's a Core i7 860 quad core, 4gb RAM Nvidia 8800GT (power efficient during it's time but compared to today's GPUs it's now power hungry), Intel SSD a 750GB HDD, Blu-ray and dvd-r drive. Under load it could get up to may 200watts. If you have an SLI or crossfire system then you might need a crazy powerful system but most of that is not necessary.

 

haha oh ok, thanks for that, should i go ahead and replace the 400W one with a newer more energy efficient PSU? it would be nice to have native SATA power plugs instead of having to have molex adapters haha. i'm not running SLI or crossfire. i just play GTA 4 and do minor web development/photoshop stuff for my veterans organization at school.

 

Sure, I wonder if your PS became more inefficient overtime.

This one looks like it'll do the job....but don't expect it to make you breakfast or read poetry to you cause you'll be sorely disappointed.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817371033

 

nice, that's perfect. thanks!

 

So on my PC if I used the PS I linked you to above it would have at least 82% power efficiency when my desktop was at idle (60w) while a 650w PS probably would not since it'd be less than 10% of it's rated power and it's hard for a PS to be as efficient with such a low load. So by going lower power you save even more moola.

 

I always use ghost, but hirum's boot disk is a good free option

 

Good call. We use Acronis at work to clone drives and I have a valid copy for home use. It's easy to use and it gui based.

 

alright. it was getting late during the cloning so i let it finish over night. woke up this morning and it cloned everything over. i unplugged the 300gb drive and the 1.5tb booted and then to my dismay, ghost cloned even the partition so now the partition is at 300GB with 1.2TB of unpartitioned space. grrr. i plug in my 300gb drive so i can try to clone again and check my options in ghost and noticed my 300gb drive is hosed. nice. whatever i have my data on the right drive now. so a quick question being, can i create a partition with that free space on the 1.5tb drive and merge the 1.2tb of free space to the 300gb partition? i only ask because i've got classes here soon and dont really have time to look through the options figured if you guys knew off the top of your head. thanks!

 

Sounds like you picked the right time to clone your HD!

Yes, it is possible with disk partitioning tools.

 

If you're in Windows 7 you should be able to expand the 300gb partition if the 1.2tb is unallocated space. open disk management right-click on extend volume. If the 1.2tb is formatted delete it's partition and you should then be able to extend the volume.

 

nice, i'll get that a try once i get home.

 

yep that was so quick and didn't even need to download third party software for that one!! i have it all setup exactly how i want it set now

now to figure out why my utorrent isn't working, (wasn't before the clone too)

all my upload and download arrows are red. i don't know why, they are going to the correct directory, i've enabled port forwarding to the ip of my PC, i've even randomized the port (just incase it's the ISP) and i did the built in test that tests your speed and your open ports and that ran good. as far as seeds and peers go, it shows there are seeds and peers, but the numbers are only in the parenthesis, and only zeros out of the parenthesis. any ideas?

 

here's a screenshot (i know it's big, i tried to get all info i could in it.....

 

What's up with blurring out all the file names?

No fair.

Quid pro quo...

 

i'll be happy to let you know the file names but i'm not gonna broadcast it on the interwebz... legality issues. pm me if you are interested haha. it's not pr0n

 

i think i found the culprit, i used a different source for torrents and it's downloading, and it just happened to be all my torrents are from the original source (it's a more secure site).

so i'm guessing its an issue that will resolve itself. thanks for all the help guys

 

Glad I could help....