Dear collective knowledge,

Not a device for making copies of your favourite adult film star, but a disc cloning utility. I want to replace my original windows drive with a new one, on a system without an original XP installation disc.

Do any of the readers have any experience with this piece of software. The net seems to say good things, but you never can tell.

Any horror stories welcome!

CBA

Not your exact product unfortunately but I have used HDClone 3.2 by Miray software to copy a laptop drive to a new larger hard disk and it worked fine. Created a bootable drive with no snags. They have a free version and then graded versions which provide more speed and greater functionality for graduated increases in cost - I used the basic edition.

I don't know that specific software, but disk cloning is a mature technology, so there really shouldn't be any issue.

There are lots of freebie disk imaging packages available - lots of PC magazine cover disk have them.

If you are intending to clone your existing Win XP to a larger hard disk, you should have zero problems. It is non-destructive, you can always revert to the original disk.

Important to check one thing though - ensure that the disk capacity you are adding is recognised by the BIOS - e.g. I have some older systems where the maximum disk the BIOS supports is 80 GB.

You either expand the existing image to occupy the full size of the new disk or partition the new disk to match the existing size, and create another partition - for example "Data".

If you are dealing with a desktop system that has space to install 2 hard disks, you could just add the second disk as a Data disk, move all the non-system stuff over from the first disk and continue on your way with out having to clone the disk at all.

I generally prefer to have the System disk as the smallest disk - it is easy enough to put all data onto the 2nd HDD.

If you are dealing with a laptop, you can still re-use the existing disk by buying an external USB 2 caddy (ensuring that the height will accommodate your disk - older 2.5" disks were taller than newer ones).

SD

Thanks chaps.

Saab, it's the third disk (and the biggest). I agree with your 'smallest drive' logic, but it's the only SATA 300 drive I have (SATA 300 m-board) and it's got 32mb cache. I was assuming this would be best utilised as my windows drive. Do you agree?

If I don't reply for the next three weeks it's because it's all gone wrong!

CBA

Whilst it makes sense to have the small disc as the system disc, isn't it also the case that the newer, larger disc is probably faster and the pc would therefore run faster with the system on it. Perhaps though, the speed of the other components would become the limiting factor.

it's the only SATA 300 drive I have

If you are converting from IDE as boot disk to SATA you will have problems - it will NOT be a simple clone. How will you get the windows SATA drivers on?

You MIGHT be able to clone, then run a windows install and repair the existing installation on the SATA disk and supply the drivers on floppy as requested.

I would be tempted to leave the existing disk as is and add the SATA as a data disk - assuming that's an option.

Otherwise just do a fresh install on the SATA disk.

Regarding speed of disk - yes, ideally you would have the fastest disk as system disk. However, disk speed is a pretty minor contributor to overall speed. And you can always put the pagefile on the faster disk. You can also install programs on any disk.

SD

Thanks for the help!

Was a SATA to SATA swap and was painless as you suggested. In the end I used a piece of software called Seagate Discwizard, which, as far as I can work out is Acronis Trueimage for free! Search for it in the Seagate support site.

Cheers all!

CBA

Yes, it's Acronis. It does a check for at least one Seagate or Maxtor drive in the system.