Cloning hard drive software

Flashgear

Flashgear

Flashgear
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Hi all. I'm in a bit of a pit...I've just got 2 new Western Digital HDD's(1tb and 500gb- 236gb of data). I had 2 Seagate drives before these new ones, I'd just use Seagate DiskWizard to easily clone one hard drive to another.

I can't do that anymore with these WD drives. So I went out and downloaded the Acronis True Image trial...I can never get it to clone. An error saying Failed to clone something something error #1394 or something. I went online to check for a solution..everything recommended didn't work.


I've also tried Norton Ghost 14.0. After 3 times of trying and over 2 hours of waiting for each clone..at 99% it fails..which just p!sses me off.

I've also tried like 3 other free ones, waited for one which took 12 hours, one says the 2 drives must be equal or more to the hard drive being cloned. Another just doesn't see the 500gb at all.

So I'm up to my head with this issue and I urgently need a solution..I don't want to backup, I want a clone of my hard drive, nothing else.

Anyone? :(
 
I have had similar problems when I tried to clone the drive that contains the active OS. I get better results by using another computer (or just load the OS on another small drive and boot from that drive) to create and upload. I also get better results by first creating the clone (as a backup) and then restoring to the new drive rather than cloning directly to the new drive. I have always done it with Acronis. Good luck.
 
VanZan said:
I have had similar problems when I tried to clone the drive that contains the active OS. I get better results by using another computer (or just load the OS on another small drive and boot from that drive) to create and upload. I also get better results by first creating the clone (as a backup) and then restoring to the new drive rather than cloning directly to the new drive. I have always done it with Acronis. Good luck.
Click to expand...

always better to boot to dos if you can and do it if its an active os drive otherwise stick it into another pc.
 
I did thunk the Seagate software worked as long as one of the drivers was a seagate drive. Guess I are wrong. Bummer. Good luck though!
 
Clonezilla should work on this situation, as long as you can live with the spartan interface. I've used it on Seagate, WD, Samsung and Maxtor drives without a problem. The livecd is about 100mb, worth a look maybe?
 
Disk Cloning...
http://www.ioltechnology.co.za/article_page.php?iArticleId=4308383

that article is recommending Clonezilla...
http://clonezilla.sourceforge.net/

But here is another article looking at the best of the disk cloning tools...
(Clonezilla is top of their list too)...
http://packratstudios.com/index.php...ghost-who-a-list-of-open-source-alternatives/

They are as follows...
Ping...
http://ping.windowsdream.com/
PartImage...
http://www.partimage.org/Main_Page
g4u...
http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/
linbox...
http://lrs.linbox.org/
and FOG...
http://freeghost.no-ip.org/

Free Disk Imaging/Cloning Software...
http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp
http://www.clonezilla.org/
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/xxclone.html
http://www.paragon-software.com/home/db-express/download.html
http://www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm
 
Thanks everyone. I just keep getting the same flippin' issue for each program I use. "The destination disk(500Gb) is not large enough to do this clone". It's 272Gb's!!! that's not going over 500Gb!!:mad:

I can't get past this and it's pissing me off, so far WD is a load of rubbish. I get sold a brand new 1Tb that's faulty and now I must struggle and waste money trying to fix something I never caused because of Matrix Warehouse and WD.:mad::mad:

I really need a solution..this hard drive is making worse and worse sounds and files are going missing. :(:mad:
 
Umm.. this maybe a stupid question... but is the destination drive FAT32 or NTFS? I'm sure that whatever software should make the partition along with the file system, but I have had issues when the drive is FAT32 to start, it gives the error that the disk is not large enough..
 
I'm using Partition Commander ($49-95). Very nice disk copy/split/merge/format/defragment/partition etc. tool.

The copy is basic, but allows for "resize proportionally" and "Copy without free space blocks'
 
Last edited:
Drive Image XML +1, I alwasy put the drives in external drives and then do the clone.
I also had a problem once wit a big file and FAT32, had to convert my drive to NTFS.
 
I've been using Norton Ghost for some time now. Works just great! I know many people hear the word Norton and cringe but this is something they did get right.
 
Tero said:
Thanks everyone. I just keep getting the same flippin' issue for each program I use. "The destination disk(500Gb) is not large enough to do this clone". It's 272Gb's!!! that's not going over 500Gb!!:mad:
Click to expand...

Let me get this right. You are trying to image a 500GB drive with 272GB of data to another 500GB drive, correct?

1. If the imaging software is trying to make an exact clone it does not care about the amount of data on the source drive, it copies the data and empty space.
2. Not all 500GB HDDs are the same size, some are slightly larger/smaller than others. Look at the drives Byte size or LBA&Sector values etc and compare them. So if the source drive is slightly larger you will encounter issues.

If you want to increase the size of the destination drive slightly download HDDEraser as it will free up a bit of extra space where the manfacturer hides some stuff, perfectly safe I have used it many times. http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml

Alternatively you could resize the source drive partitions making them slightly smaller so there is free space at the end of the drive and just image the partitions instead of the entire drive.

Use CloneZilla, just don't confuse the source and destination drives as with any software!!!
 
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