[Adebisi]

Big fan of the old Norton Ghost.

Looking for a product that boots from a CD that lets me copy discs or partitions to images, or another disk, or to DVD-R and CD-R or even to USB keys. Hopefully something with SATA and USB drive support. Very important the product does not write any data at all to the source HDD but boots fully off of the bootable CD.

Free would be nice, would happily pay to. Would even buy a technicians license for multiple computer use if available.

Thanks,

[Advertisements]

i've used Drive Image XML on multiple occasions to "ghost" hard drives...it can do a standard backup (where it just makes an image of existing data) or it can do a "Raw" disk to disk copy (copys EVERYTHING even free space to maintain the partition sizing etc..) it uses a combination of locking technologies and windows VSS (volume shadow services...which is nice) so you can back up an ACTIVE drive with it...really nice

the most current build of the UBCD4WIN has Drive image already included so you can not only use all the other awesome tules included in the UBCD but you can also ghost a drive with it....if you're planning on being a PC tech (professionally or just because you're "that guy" in town)...then the UBCD is a must have for the toolkit....it does great things

[dsenette]

i've used Drive Image XML on multiple occasions to "ghost" hard drives...it can do a standard backup (where it just makes an image of existing data) or it can do a "Raw" disk to disk copy (copys EVERYTHING even free space to maintain the partition sizing etc..) it uses a combination of locking technologies and windows VSS (volume shadow services...which is nice) so you can back up an ACTIVE drive with it...really nice

the most current build of the UBCD4WIN has Drive image already included so you can not only use all the other awesome tules included in the UBCD but you can also ghost a drive with it....if you're planning on being a PC tech (professionally or just because you're "that guy" in town)...then the UBCD is a must have for the toolkit....it does great things

[MRM4]

Would either of those be good for duplicating a hard drive onto a larger drive? We have one user with a tiny hard drive and is almost out of space. We were considering getting Ghost and copying his hard drive to a larger hard drive. We've never done it ourselves, a former employee used to do it though. We want something relatively easy.

[dsenette]

yeah...either ghost or drive image could do that....i don't use ghost...but with drive image you've got two methods to use..

#1 you do a normal image to a second drive...then restore it from that drive to the new primary hard drive in the system (the one that replaces the tiny one)

#2 you would do the RAW backup direct disk to disk (from old drive to new drive) then use a program lilke GPARTED to resize that partition on the new drive

[Adebisi]

If you look at the manufacturer website for your new hard drive, they almost always have a download-able boot-able disk just for that task.

[MRM4]

yeah...either ghost or drive image could do that....i don't use ghost...but with drive image you've got two methods to use..

#1 you do a normal image to a second drive...then restore it from that drive to the new primary hard drive in the system (the one that replaces the tiny one)

#2 you would do the RAW backup direct disk to disk (from old drive to new drive) then use a program lilke GPARTED to resize that partition on the new drive

That was a good product, easy to use. I added another hard drive to my PC at work for more storage space. For kicks, I copied my current hard drive onto the extra one. All the files copied and I connected it as my primary hard drive, I disconnected the other one. It tried loading Windows, but would not log onto our network. Anything I can do about this?