Who's got a recommendation. My client's Windows 8 HDD is dying. The replacement is here but I know my old version of Norton Ghost won't work with GPT. I'd much rather clone it then try to setup her PC again.

 

Paragon > *

/thread

 

Get a Mac

 

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

says its supported, but i've never used it on a GPT disk though. Works fine for MBR disks.

 

What did you end up using Daniel?

 

Nothing. Ended up doing a reinstall and transferring the data from the bad drive, took all day and then some.

Almost all files copied except for one 50GB VHD snapshot file. A year ago when I setup her new PC I did a P2V conversion of her old XP PC and I was looking into to using Hyper-v snapshot capability as a possible backup solution for her VHD (IDK) or something. In the process I created a snapshot and apparently for the last year she was running on the snapshot VHD and it was keeping track of all changes between it and the original XP VHD. It had ballooned to 50GB and due to a bad sector or something it wouldn't copy.

It took me a while to figure out why I couldn't log into the VM with her current password and only her old one. Then the change caused a trust relationship failure between the VM and the domain controller and Hyper-v integration drivers where windows 8 drivers and not windows 8.1. Blah blah blah the world had moved on without it and it caused some issues. But since all her data is saved to a network drive it wasn't much of an issue. I finally got the right drivers installed and got it back on the domain, still isn't running as good as it used to but she doesn't use it for much anymore...

I thought of using something like SpinRite to see if it could fix the read error on the VHD snapshot file but never bothered with it because it would take too damn long and I've already put a couple days into it and it wasn't worth all that time for a potentially small improvement.

 

OK.

Didn't know if you tried DriveImageXML.

 

I know the need has passed, but have you tried Clonezilla (http://clonezilla.org/)?

 

That looks like it does everything. What's your experience with it? Is it as easy to use as Norton Ghost?

 

Ghost is a little more user friendly, but Clonezilla is not "hard" to use by any means.

However, it doesn't dynamically size partitions upon restore. Therefore, the destination disk cannot be smaller than the source and if the destination is larger you'll need to manually resize the partition(s) to take advantage of the additional space (which is easily done via your favorite partition editor). However, I haven't messed with the "expert" settings in Clonezilla so it's completely possible there is a way to manage this.

I've been using Clonezilla for years, since about 2003 when I gave a presentation about it in a high school computer repair class. It does the job.

Recently I've been using Clonezilla to image VMware VMs to restore to XenServer VMs. CentOS, Ubuntu, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 R2...works beautifully!

 

Ok after spending a few hours trying to get this working I'm giving up. it's ok software however it doesn't auto resize the image like ghost and it will fail as soon as it encounters a bad block which makes it useless for cloning from a failing drive to a good drive.

Gonna try Paragon now, though it looks like the clone is disabled in the demo. They're crazy if they think I"m going to drop $99 on their software so I can find out that it can't clone a failing drive.

Why the fuck can't ghost just support GPT then I wouldn't have to deal with this...

 

Yeah Paragon looks cool but I'm unsure about how it handles bad blocks. You can tell ghost to give zero fucks about bad blocks and it will copy without failing.

Paragon has some settings called "Check FS Integrity Policy" and "Data Loss Protection Mode" not entirely sure what they do, but I wonder if turning them off will ignore disk errors. Either way I'm not spending $99 to find out

 

On to clonezilla...

 

It ignored the errors I encountered. Copied a bunch of old drives my wife had.

 

so close

Clonezilla does have an option to continue even though there's bad blocks and does have an option to automatically resize the partition.......however it will only auto resize mbr partitions not GPT.

 

Well then let me borrow your license key and try it out and if it works I'll talk to my boss about buying it. Cause we're going to keep running into this and need a solution instead of reinstall OS on new drive cause that takes all day

 

http://www.todo-backup.com/products/...p-software.htm

Never used it but free and says it works with GPT... YMMV.

or: http://www.minitool-drivecopy.com/dr...partition.html