What does one need to know to Clone a HDD?

From what I have read is that the easiest way to upgrade a HDD is to purchase an enclosure with the HDD, clone the current to the new HDD in the enclosure, then swap them.

What is necessary to clone a HDD? I believe I need to purchase software.

I have read that Windows XP cannot be cloned.
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=418

I don't know when that article was written. Is there software now that can clone Windows XP?

After the HDD's are swapped. Can the OS and programs stay on the external HDD? Or would this conflict? My guess is that the software can walk me through all this.

 

I've cloned my drives before - if the only thing changing is just the drives (usually for upgrade purposes) then I swap them out and just blank the original disk and use it as external storage.

There are a few different programs to try out but they all function about the same. Once swapped out the OS and programs now on the external drives will probably NOT work - since directory pointers will all be off due to the changes in drive letters.

 

I have not tried this yet, but wouldn't this be the same as taking a partition/drive image for backup, then when needing to restore just using that image for that specific drive/partition. The issues I could see drive to drive would be driver settings, so maybe if you could manually get into the image and update those. Wait for someone with some more info.

 

Paragon Disk Manager or Acronis TrueImage

That's all you need.

 

Acronis True Image is excellent because when cloning to a bigger hard drive it automatically extend the partition to the whole drive.

 

i recently did this With Acronis True Image.Originally my Laptop had a 100Gb drive which i wanted to upgrade to a 250GB.Grabbed a 250GB and external 2.5" enclosure cloned the disk and swapped.All went flawless

 

I bought a second HDD for my notebook and use Paragon Drive Backup to backup the live HDD to an external USB drive. I can then swap the drives in the notebook, use the bootable CD of Paragon Drive Backup and restore the backup on the external USB drive to the HDD in the notebook. Voila! Two identical drives plus a backup copy, too!

 

For personal use the product XXClone is excellent freeware.

Cheers,

 

I normally use Acronis TrueImage Home or Symantec Ghost Corporate for cloning. Both do a great job. One of my colleagues suggested CloneZilla to me last week as an open-source alternative; I haven't gotten a chance to try it yet. And Windows XP can be cloned just fine, and has been able to be cloned since it was released, it's all in the software.

With Acronis TrueImage, you don't necessarily need an enclosure, if you have another machine at home and a network switch. You can create a shared folder on the other computer, boot off the Acronis CD, and clone the drive to a compressed image over the network. You do, of course, have to have a basic home network, and enough space to hold the image, but it works well. If that's a problem, the USB enclosure route works fine too.

 

Acronis TrueImage 11 or Paragon Disk Manager;

They both have free trial downloads. Do I have to purchase it then for it to work?

 

I use Paragon because I never could get Acronis to restore. I did finally get a refund from Acronis, though.

Try them both, use what works for both backup and restore (and try both backup and restore with both). Your system may react differently than mine did.

 

I find Paragon in my books superior to Acronis. Paragon is also able to handle dynamic disks (Windows Software Raid) properly as well. Highly recommend Paragon for partitioning, backup/restores and cloning.

 

I used Acronis True Image and it was VERY simple. Simply hit "clone drive" and away you go. Just make sure you clone from your computer to the external enclosure. Took about 20 minutes, I swapped the drives and rebooted the computer and everything was the same and I used the computer right away with another 80 GB of space. Great investment for $40.

 

What version of Acronis did you use?

I'm just curious --I have found that if you use an old version, some new hardware may not be supported for cloning (I used to use version 7, but going to version 10, and now version 11 has fixed that), but I've never had problems restoring from a network or cloning across drives. I create custom bootable restore-sets for some machines I work on with the option that lets me burn images to CD/DVD on the fly, and those have worked well too, including one set that made from a RAID-1 setup I built for someone.

 

What brand of HDD did you buy? I just upgraded from a 40gig toshiba to a 160gig WD. The WD Datalifeguard Tools allowed me to create partitions on my new drive as well as clone my old drive. Then once I swapped the drives out it also let me partition and format my 40gig toshiba so I could have a nice portable external HDD. Not bad for freeware I downloaded off the internet.