Win 7 64BIT and Disk Cloning Software Suggestion.

[arik4k]

ok lemme start by saying Hey to everyone in the board,
in the past few days i've been Reading, almost every Post i found about Imaging in the Forum, but all that left me in the End is confused.

I have a windows 7 64 bit Machine (Bare Minimum Office, AV, Drivers And Custom Settings, Reg fixes)

I want to make an Image of this Install so i can later Restore it if i choose to.

Until now i've been very Happy with Hiren boot cd
and been using Acronis True Image and Ghost For the past years through Windows XP And Vista.

and been very Happy with it and it worked flawlessly for all my Images.

I Didn't Mind Maintaining several Images for my 2 Laptops and 2 Pcs that's the way I want it.
After that I moved to Working with WinPE and Imagex in vista 32 bit and everything was fine.
Year ago I decided to move to Win 7 64 bit, made all the adjustments with my software and drivers and installed a Basic and a Complete PC with 2 images, using hiren boot cd and acronis and ghost,
Been painfull to find out that it didn't work, perhaps because of the System reserved partition that wasn't backed up.
My System works in AHCI Mode now.
I Refuse installing a Software on my PC I don't want it to do Weekly Backups, all I wanna do is A boot cd that Images my drive to a single file, that I can restore it from the boot cd later on.
I Tried working with:
Macrium reflect,
Windows Backup and restore center
Acronis true Image Home
CloneZilla (Which doesn't make a single file but alot of files in folders)
WinPE Imagex 64 bit, which copied all to a Single Wim File but restore was Painful and didn't Restore it well.

From Hiren boot CD i tried.
Acronis True image 8.1 server.
Ghost 11.5.1 + in the WinPE installed the ghost 64 bit version to see if that works, not so much no...

This is a Cry out for help

Any 1 tried Hiren, find the Method to work like i want to ?

Any help will be Greatly Appreciated,

thanks for the patience.

 

[richc46]

Welcome

Software recommened most by this forum is Macrium Reflex and Paragon.
http://www.paragon-software.com/home/db-express/

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp Although you did not like this one

System image inclued with you OS is also very good.

 

[arik4k]

yea i know they are the recomended ones, i read most of the threads i found in the forum, but they don't do what i want... which is an outside dos based full Bit to bit image of win 7 64 bit, so i can clone back into an the HD from a different drive.

they depend on installing software on the OS which i don't want to do, and have not worked well from my tryouts,
i tried both macrium which backed up fast and restored but i feel it kinda flaky dunno y, checked thier forums and i don't like it, can't explain it, i preffer not to use it.

and paragon took an 1.5 hrs for an image restore for a clean basic win 7 installation and not from the a dos envo like i want..

 

[zzz2496]

Macrium Reflect image can be restored using it's recovery CD (the recovery CD is Linux based appliance). I have no problem so far, been backing up and restoring images for many computers so far... I even store my images in my SAN/NAS server, and the recovery can connect to that server and restore off a network share... As far as I know, my images are bit to bit copy of the original data (except for the empty disk space that I don't backup).

zzz2496

Edit: Or you can always use Clonezilla !!!

 

[theog]

You may like to look at Norton Ghost v15, which runs from a WinPE, no installing.
Uses cold imaging technology.

 

[whs]

I Refuse installing a Software on my PC

With this quote in mind, the only option you have is the Win7 native imaging facility. There is not much else we can recommend - unless you go for a live PE or Linux CD.

 

[arik4k]

exactly, any 1 tried uhmmm ghost 11.5.1 or acronis true image server 8, my buissness owns both software for windows XP/Vista deployment as well, for PC Tech guys which give service from store to store.. but none of them test it with win 7 64 bit.

 

[whs]

For Win7 you do need Ghost 15. But Macrium does work with Win7 64bit - I am posiotive because I am using the free version on such a system.

 

[arik4k]

OK i found my solution; i tried the trial version acronis true image 2010
Couldn't backup cause it's trial but seems to be booting and does everything i want + recognize my driver's ahci mode as well.
Ghost 15 which i got a 6 months subscription from their representative trying to market it to my office.
Does what I want but splits the files to 2 files + a lot of junk files located in a folder.

For now I guess I will purchase the ATI HOME 2010 and use only it's bootcd cause basically
It's all I ever wanted.

Unless any good recommendation on ghost 15 vs ATI 2010 ?

Thanks again for all the help.

 

[SuperFlyBoy]

OK i found my solution; i tried the trial version acronis true image 2010
Couldn't backup cause it's trial but seems to be booting and does everything i want + recognize my driver's ahci mode as well.
Ghost 15 which i got a 6 months subscription from their representative trying to market it to my office.
Does what I want but splits the files to 2 files + a lot of junk files located in a folder.

For now I guess I will purchase the ATI HOME 2010 and use only it's bootcd cause basically
It's all I ever wanted.

Just as a follow-up to this thread, and for more information for all, I just purchased the upgrade ATI Home 2012, where I had a similar incident to the OP - the software just *could not* clone a disk!

I had to revert back to my old ATI 2010 copy to get it cloned.

*However*, note that if you only have to clone a disk, Western Digital offers the Acronis cloning program on their website for free - something I forgot about. Since I am using WD drives, this would have been a better option for me and I could have saved my $$...

(I am running Win 7 64-bit, which is the reason 2012 failed)

 

[Corazon]

This can't be right...

Anytime you use a boot CD to image an offline system (without running from it), it doesn't matter if that system is 64-bit or not, or even if it's Windows or something completely different.

As for Macrium, there are good reasons why it's one of the recommendations on this forum. It works very reliably - I'm not sure why you're dead set against installing a simple imaging app or why you feel that it's "somehow flaky." That's not a rational approach and you need to provide more details as to why you feel it's not doing the job.

 

[King Drax I]

On the subject of cloning, I wonder if anyone knows how to crack this problem I have.

I have a dual-boot Win7-64 and WinXP-32 system; the two OS'es are on separat partitions on the same hard drive. I'm about to get a larger hard drive and I want to clone the two partitions, along with my startup boot menu for OS choice, onto that new hard drive.

I have an external hard drive caddy, USB connection.

Does anyone know what software I would be best to use in order to clone the old hard drive on to the new one, while still preserving the partition and boot menu structure, please?

 

[jesrani]

On the subject of cloning, I wonder if anyone knows how to crack this problem I have.

I have a dual-boot Win7-64 and WinXP-32 system; the two OS'es are on separat partitions on the same hard drive. I'm about to get a larger hard drive and I want to clone the two partitions, along with my startup boot menu for OS choice, onto that new hard drive.

I have an external hard drive caddy, USB connection.

Does anyone know what software I would be best to use in order to clone the old hard drive on to the new one, while still preserving the partition and boot menu structure, please?

Try DriveImageXML. Its free. I have used successfully on XP. Never had a dual boot system so not sure about that. But as a cloning tool its very good. Also I have always cloned from a PE environment, specifically UBC4DWIN but I believe it can be used from within windows as it can utilise shadow copy.

 

[King Drax I]

On the subject of cloning, I wonder if anyone knows how to crack this problem I have.

I have a dual-boot Win7-64 and WinXP-32 system; the two OS'es are on separat partitions on the same hard drive. I'm about to get a larger hard drive and I want to clone the two partitions, along with my startup boot menu for OS choice, onto that new hard drive.

I have an external hard drive caddy, USB connection.

Does anyone know what software I would be best to use in order to clone the old hard drive on to the new one, while still preserving the partition and boot menu structure, please?

Try DriveImageXML. Its free. I have used successfully on XP. Never had a dual boot system so not sure about that. But as a cloning tool its very good. Also I have always cloned from a PE environment, specifically UBC4DWIN but I believe it can be used from within windows as it can utilise shadow copy.

Thank you, will give that a try and post on here how I get on. Cheers!

 

[naluv4u2]

Win 7 64BIT and Disk Cloning Software Suggestion

I had the same problem with Windows 7 64-bit. NONE of the cloning software were able to see the external USB hard drive I was trying to clone in an effort recover any data from it. I did not want to perform any recovery options on the failing hard drive I was trying to clone. Tried many of the most popular cloning programs advertised on the web including the ones mention previously in this thread. No go. I just found one today called DriveImage XML and it worked. It found the hard drive where all the others failed. I had hope that I could recover the data from the failing hard drive because Windows was reporting it in Disk Management as a healthy hard drive and I just think the MBR got corrupted and it is not really a bad hard drive. I just want to clone it so I can attempt to regain access to the data stored on the "failing" hard drive. Here is a link to the product that worked for me:

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DriveImage XML Backup Software - Data Recovery Product

I have also included screenshots to show that Windows 7 Disk Management could see the hard drive but other cloning products COULD NOT!



This is a screenshot from Windows 7 Disk Management and as you can see it clearly shows there is another hard drive attached to the computer.
▼



However, NONE of the cloning softwares I tried could see it, here is a screenshot from just one of them:
▼



Here is a list of cloning software I tried:

EASEUS
PC CLONEZILLA
MACRIUM REFLECT
ACRONIS TRUE IMAGE DATA RECOVERY
R-STUDIO
DATA RESCUE
RECUVA
SPOTMAU RECOVERY TOOLS
REMO RECOVER
PC DATA RECOVER
MINI TOOLS DATA RECOVERY
STELLAR PHOENIX
WISE DATA RECOVERY . . . AND MANY MORE

Spent an aggravating week on this matter but I'm happy to say I found at least program that can actually see the drive. I tried the suggests mention in this thread of booting with another disk (such as Linux) I created a bootable Recovery Disk from several of the cloning software (including HCD Boot CD) but without success, the clone softwares did not find the external drive. ARRRGGGHHH I will come back to this thread for an update later to let others know if I was successful or not at cloning and/or recovering the data from the hard drive. HOPE THIS HELPS SOMEBODY ELSE!