Cloning IDE HD to instal on bigger drive.

[#1]

Hi folks...Happy New Year (if that is possible!!).
My elderly Dell OptiPlex GX110  with XT Pro is sadly in need of a bigger HD, it was a server but the usual anti-virus etc., just about goes in to its 9GB. I have laid my hands on a couple of 160GB drives and want to bung the whole contents of its existing HD on to one of them. I have looked at wikipedia on the subject and am amazed at the variety of software to do this. Has anyone experience of doing this and can recommend something? Clonezilla Live looks likely but rather complicated. R-Drive Image is OK but at $50 has to be worth the expense.
colintivy  ???.

[#2]

Personally I use HDclone, but it's not free for most things you might want to do .
There is a very slow and basic free version that may do what you need. http://www.miray.de/products/sat.hdclone.html

[#3]

Clonezilla should work fine. Use the device-device option and it will give you options to copy the boot sector and also to expand the target disc partition to fill the drive if thats what you want.

[#4]

Try http://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/ for a free Windows program that I think will do what you're looking for.
Alternatives include:
http://clonezilla.org/ as you mentioned,
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php
http://www.paragon-software.com/uk/home/index.html.
There's a 2-year old Revision3 vidcast: http://revision3.com/systm/harddriveswap?fs which may help too.
TBH, I'd get a new computer instead.

[#5]

My favourite disc cloning software is Acronis True Image - not free but not terribly expensive and can be used also for backup http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B003YCOHGY/ .  However the changed user interface on the latest (2011) version is attracting some criticism; my version is 2010.

[#6]

Depending on the disk manufacturer it may be worth checking their website, some provide free software for cloning (the last one I used was a version of Acronis True Image that checked whether one of the disks in the system was from the manufacturer concerned then just worked as normal (I think it was Western Digital (but found on Seagate site as they own WD, I believe other manufacurers (but not all) offer similar software to make it easier to upgrade using one of their products.

[#7]

I done it a couple of times using partition software actually.
First things to note:
It seems to work most of the time but when you boot the new drive for the first time the system will initiate the new hardware wizard because its found itself running on a new hard drive. Not a massive problem, just slows the system down a little on its first boot.
On the odd occasion the partition manager hasn't done me any favours and once left me with an WinXP system that was bootin from c and running from both c and d at the same time (you cannot begin to imagine the amount of chaos and confusion that caused). I would definitely recommend going with disk cloning software for this very reason. I think the blunder I made was to clone the partition of the currently running drive whereas I had previously put both drives into another machine and cloned it that way.
All the best,
Okrz

[#8]

Quote from: okrzynska

.......... I think the blunder I made was to clone the partition of the currently running drive whereas I had previously put both drives into another machine and cloned it that way.

Acronis True Image lets you create a boot disc that you can use to clone one drive to another on the same machine without having to launch Windows.  I find this more reliable for cloning than the Windows-based version of the same software.

[#9]

@ReedRichards
Thanks for that, but I followed your link to Amazon which seems to paint a sorry picture. Yes 3 bodies seemed to be happy but 23 definitely did not in customer reviews which is not very encouraging. You would seem to be a 4th happy bunny! I shall consider some of the other options as well before going further and report back.
Colin

[#10]

Colin, as I mentioned earlier, the revised user interface for True Image 2011 is not going down well!  I have the 2010 version; I would have given a link to that if I could have found one.