Hard drive cloning programs

[Duker]

What are good, easy to use colning software for Win 7. Kelly

 

[seekermeister]

I can't tell you yet, except to say to avoid Acronis TI 2010. I have spent the day trying to get it installed and working without any success as of yet. I may well be the exception, because there are alot of others who have it working okay, but one bad experience is enough for me.

 

[Howie]

Hi I'm using Macrium Reflect it's free just google it does what it says on the tin
give it a try !!

 

[aem]

Norton Ghost for me.

 

[Tews]

Ive been using Acronis True Image Home 10 since day one, and it has saved my bacon more than once...

 

[lordvader]

Doesnt windows 7 come with a program to
Complete Image backup ?

Isnt that good enough or reliable ?

 

[Tews]

Yes it does come with a back up utility.. whether it is good enough is a subjective question...

 

[pparks1]

I can't tell you yet, except to say to avoid Acronis TI 2010. I have spent the day trying to get it installed and working without any success as of yet. I may well be the exception, because there are alot of others who have it working okay, but one bad experience is enough for me.

I have it and I'm using it and it's working just fine for me on Win 7 Ultimate 64-bit. No problems installing, using, restoring, etc. I've got it on a lab machine and I test with it quite regular and restore back to prior points to test again.

Macrium Reflect is good..as it's free. However, I had problems with my mouse not working on the restore and I tried everything that I could think of and could never get my mouse and such working...so I just picked up Acronis when NewEgg was running it for $23.99.

The built-in imaging tool is good...but it's not really for cloning as it can only move it to another drive which is the same size as the original.

 

[harpua]

Acronis TIH 2010 has a cloning utility that is found under the "Tools & Utilities" menu in the program. It can clone to any size disk, provided the data on the source disk will fit on the target disk. It has two modes, automatic and manual. If one uses automatic, then the partitions on the source will be automatically resized proportionally on the target if the target drive is a different size than the source. So if the target drive is larger than the source, each partition on the target will be automatically proportionally resized to be larger than they are on the source. This may or may not be desirable and this could make cloning not possible in some circumstances, depending on the size of the source partitions and the size of the target drive, if the target drive is smaller than the source.

So in the situation where the automatic mode produces undesirable results or won't work at all, one can use the manual cloning mode and this allows one to manually set the size of the partitions for the target drive, and use any size drive, again, assuming the data on the source partitions will actually fit on the target drive and in the partition sizes that one manually specifies.

So in sum, I have found Acronis TIH to quite easily make very reliable clones to any size drive, assuming there is sufficient space on the target drive to fit all the data that is on the source drive.

That said, for backing up my laptop drive by cloning (which I occasionally do in addition to regularly making compressed image backups), I usually clone to a drive that is the same size so I can use the automatic mode with just a few quick clicks, without having to manually resize any partitions. It just makes it quicker and simpler. But I have used the manual mode when cloning to different sized drives and it works quite well also. Just takes a little more time and effort.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

Cloning has different meanings to different people.

Some mean an imaging program. Some mean an application that can tranfer an existing operating system partition to another hard drive on the same PC, without an intervening image--as might be done when you upgrade to a new hard drive.

Macrium Reflect Free cannot do the latter. Acronis can.

 

[hoganth]

Cloning

I used MaxBlast5 downloaded from maxtor website. It is a limited version of Acronis True Image but has the cloning feature you are looking for. I originally installed win 7 rc on a 40 gig drive. I was able to clone to a bigger maxtor drive (120gb). Running for about 2 weeks now with no problems. I used the automatic settings and followed the prompts.
Simple

 

[Duker]

Acronis messed up my MBR . I tryed Macrium reflect,it screwed up major .I just want to do an image so I can go to a bigger hard drive . Kelly

 

[SIW2]

If you had trouble with both those products - that is surprising.

If you want to make an image or clone , give Todo (free) a whirl - see if you can get that to work for you:

Free backup and restore software for system backup and restore, partition or disk backup and restore, disk clone and disk image under Windows 2000/XP/Vista/Windows 7/2003/2008..


Paragon have a new program B&R 10. It has a couple of bugs they are working on - it will be truly excellent, like all Paragon products. You might also try that:

Free Backup Software: Paragon Backup & Recovery 10 Free Edition - Overview

 

[TGSoldier]

Acronis works great for me. You sure you're following the steps properly? There is an option to check the MBR. Make sure you have it checked.

 

[pparks1]

Acronis messed up my MBR . I tryed Macrium reflect,it screwed up major .I just want to do an image so I can go to a bigger hard drive . Kelly

I had a problem with Acronis when I backed up and tried to restore one of my Windows 7 machines.

It had 3 things it was backing up
--MBR
--100MB system reserved partitioin
--150GB C drive.

Turns out my problem was that when I was doing the restore, I wasn't marking the 100MB system reserved partition as Active...so after a restore I would get a message at boot saying BOOTMGR couldn't be found. Once I discovered that little trick, I was back in business.

 

[netomx]

Have you tried these ones:


*GPARTED
*Clonezilla
*Selfimage
*PING

 

[harpua]

Acronis, used properly, has always worked great for me, for both cloning and imaging.

But to fix an MBR problem, one can probably just boot from the Windows 7 installation disk and run startup repair.

 

[pparks1]

Acronis, used properly, has always worked great for me, for both cloning and imaging.

But to fix an MBR problem, one can probably just boot from the Windows 7 installation disk and run startup repair.

Yes, but if the System Recovery is not marked as Active...then you can run the fixmbr tools all you want and it won't resolve the issue. I spent a few hours thinking the problem was with my MBR...and I ran every repair utility and windows command line tool trying to get the box to boot. Eventually noticed that my 100MB "system reserved" partition was not set to active. Once I did that, the missing BOOTMGR.EXE went away.

 

[Duker]

I ran Acronis twice and it screwed up the MBR twice, there is a thread about Acronis and Win 7 on this forum.I downloaded TODO and it is simple (supports Win 7) and seem to work.At least it did for meon 2 differnt computers,Win 7 home and 7 Pro. Kelly

 

[kevinlpugh]

TODO is the BOMB!

Ghost wouldn't work, but TODO did!