Thanks very much. Casper mentions SATA drives but not Acronis. Do you have an opinion as to which is best?

 

~Dave

Dave7518873.

You can use either of the following excellent utilities for drive to drive cloning.  

http://www.acronis.com/products/trueimage/

 http://www.fssdev.com/products/casperxp/

Bev.

I can tell you I just cloned a 80 gig SATA drive to a new 80 gig SATA  drive using Acronis True Image 8.0 and it worked like a champ. Only took about 20 minutes for the complete transfer, including all 3 partitions on the original drive.  I can't speak highly enough about Acronis.

Well thanks very much. I appreciate that.

 

I see that Casper has something new/different which seems kind of risky to me. It has a
feature which allows for "incremental cloning" which only changes what's changed since the last cloning, to save time. I'm wondering how well that works.

 

~Dave

I can only speak to my own experience with Acronis. I did this to replace the older drive with a new drive.  Previously, I had tried using the Seagate cloning software on another computer to clone an IDE 40 gig up to a new IDE 80 gig drive to replace the 40 gig.  All kinds of goofy quirks popped up and I ended up abandoning the clone and going back to the 40 gig drive only. I knew I had to find a different program from the Seagate program, and the two options were Norton Ghost 9.0 and Acronis True Image 8.0

Doing some research on Ghost led me to believe I would have to copy each of the 3 partitions (1 main and 2 hidden) separately, and I was not clear on copying the boot tracks once or 3 times plus some other options.  Acronis seemed to do it all at once with no questions about options to check, so I went with Acronis. Using Acronis to clone was a pleasure.  NO problems enountered whatsoever.  I have removed the program already as I do not use it for backups, but I'm sure it offered many backup options that you would be looking for. 

I'm a firm believer in whatever works. Acronis it is, then.

Thanks very much,

~Dave

You can even use Western Digital's free Data Lifeguard utility (DOS version) or similar products from other hard drive manufacturers.

Before using Acronis I downloaded the Western Digital program but it was not clear enough to me about copying hidden partitions and the like.  And since I had a bad experience with the similar Seagate product, it was an easy decision to move on.  As always, just my two cents . . .