Mirror Imaging Drive using USB Stick!

[Mortymoose]

Greetings to all you techies residing on this floor of our esteemed forum....

Just a fairly simple question:

HO's work Dell Laptop, the HDD is starting to make a vibrating noise, she never told me about this, I accidently discovered it..... The Laptop is about 15 months old....

I wish to mirror her SATA drive onto a new SATA drive and at some stage replace the old with the new...

Is there any good free mirror imaging Software around?

Can I save time by using a software installed and running from a USB stick to mirror the HHD inside the laptop to the new drive plugged into another usb port using a HD Enclosure?

Or should I just stop trying to be clever, use my trusty home PC and plug the two drives into SATA ports and do a straight mirror?

Yawn!

Thanks for reading my yarn!

 

[Al P]

Clonzilla, PING (PartImage Is Not Ghost), Macrium Reflect Free Edition, AOMEI Backupper, Paragon Backup and Recovery (Advanced) Free.
See link for more details and download sites: http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-drive-cloning-software.htm

Either method will work, although I prefer to attach the drives to my pc - definitely quicker.

 

[GreGorGy]

+1 Clonezilla and also GParted, if you require some GUI feeling to the process.

 

[ITCynic]

Try EaseUS ToDo Backup - always seems to work for me when I am swapping drives around

 

[ponder]

Can I save time by using a software installed and running from a USB stick to mirror the HHD inside the laptop to the new drive plugged into another usb port using a HD Enclosure?

Yes. Just keep in mind that it will be very slow over USB1/2.

I would just stick both drives into a desktop if you don't have USB3 seeing as you are gonna take the internal drive out anyway so now is as good as later.

 

[Mortymoose]

Guys thanks for the great feedback, going with Clonezilla, seems I can run a live disc, make an image onto a USB DRIVE then swap new drive into Laptop and then mirror the image back onto the newly inserted drive.....

Think the last time I did this was about 10 years back, gee! How things have changed with Live CD's

Thnx

 

[ponder]

Guys thanks for the great feedback, going with Clonezilla, seems I can run a live disc, make an image onto a USB DRIVE then swap new drive into Laptop and then mirror the image back onto the newly inserted drive.....

Think the last time I did this was about 10 years back, gee! How things have changed with Live CD's

Thnx

Yes that will work, you have the option to go Disk-->ImageFile and then ImageFile-->Disk or straight Disk-->Disk.

Keep in mind that if you use the ImageFile option your USB Drive will have to be formatted to NTFS as FAT32 has a 4GB file size limitation.


There's also plain old 'dd' which can do the same but I'm not gonna go there as you need to apply some caution when selecting source & destination hence it affectionately being referred to 'disk destroyer'. Same caution wrt source/destination should be applied with all imaging applications though.

 

[Rickster]

First check the smart status, vibrating isnt really a concern.

 

[KhoisanX]

HO's work Dell Laptop, the HDD is starting to make a vibrating noise, she never told me about this, I accidently discovered it..... The Laptop is about 15 months old....

Dell normally have a 3 year warranty?