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Disc Cloning Revisited

Mav
Moderator
Moderator
Posts: 22,369
Thanks: 4,725
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Registered: ‎06-04-2007

Disc Cloning Revisited

I currently have a 160GB SATA HDD as the system/boot drive. Considering this drive is only used for System, installed applications,page file, etc and the other 7 drives for data, temp files (except Windows temp) and the like its size is rather overkill - after 6 months less than 16GB is used. I never partition drives - never have seen the point!
I have a spare 80GB SATA drive which would be better suited as only 64GB would be wasted rather than 144GB.
I did try to clone a boot/system drive before (a free version of Paragon Partition Manager IIRC) as a test but when I swapped them over the cloned drive never worked - it wasn't recognised as a boot drive.
There is a free copy of Paragon Drive copy on this month's Computer Shopper - is this any good?
Can anyone point me towards precise, clear instructions on how to acheive what I require, please. I will re-use the 160GB afterward as an external drive and, when I clone the current drive it will be to an external one then swapped.

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1 REPLY 1
samuria
Grafter
Posts: 1,581
Thanks: 3
Registered: ‎13-04-2007

Re: Disc Cloning Revisited


You may want to check out the thread
http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,74700.0.html
There is a lot of info on copying disk there and also a link to a free copy of Acronis 9 which is the best copying software.
I essence its very simple you create a bootable cd from acronis which you do by installing it and then select create cd.
Remove all other drives to save confusion have the new drive and the old drive only installed boot from the cd and then do a disk copy. When done remove old drive set the new one as master and you should be up and running.
The key thing is to do a disk copy as this writes the MBR and boot record if you only copy a partition then a lot of product dont copy the MBR so the new drive wont boot.