Ghosting Hard Drives

Sleepy

I've searched the forum for this and gotten some info on ghosting but I've a few questions:

1. Are there any good freeware Windows based cloning tools?
2. Is it possible to ghost part of a larger hard-disk (120Gb) to a smaller disk (20Gb) if less than 20Gb of the larger disk is used?

jbkenn

All the Hard Drive manufacturers have software available on their websites which can be downloaded.
e.g. Maxtor
www.maxtor.com

You can use this software to do a partition to partition

jbkenn

aaf

I use Norton Ghost in work to create and restore images. You have options to create compressed images or not. I usually choose medium quality compression and the images vary in size from 1.5GB to 4GB, so you fit a few images on your 20 gig backup drive.

Sleepy wrote:

I've searched the forum for this and gotten some info on ghosting but I've a few questions:

1. Are there any good freeware Windows based cloning tools?
2. Is it possible to ghost part of a larger hard-disk (120Gb) to a smaller disk (20Gb) if less than 20Gb of the larger disk is used?

C Fodder

If less than 20 GB used on large drive then no problem ghosting to a 20 GB drive.
I don't know about freeware as have always used Ghost.

Capt'n Midnight

aaf wrote:

I use Norton Ghost in work to create and restore images. You have options to create compressed images or not. I usually choose medium quality compression and the images vary in size from 1.5GB to 4GB, so you fit a few images on your 20 gig backup drive.

Ghost is NOT FREE.
Also you need a license for EACH machine you image TO and/or From, so even if you have one license you can't use it on another machine.

partimage - debian/knoppix/linux etc. will copy NTFS , won't shrink it, but you can use ntfsresize to shrink the partiton first and then restore to a drive of that size or bigger. However, you may need to download and run a demo version of diskeeper to move the MFT files (do a defrag in windows xp - at the end it will list some details on the UNmovable MFT's)

G4U and DD both photocopy the disk bit by bit - unless both drives are similar geometries you could have problems with misalignment (eg: not bootable) and if the drives are different sizes you could loose the extra space or have to use gpart to expand the partitions.

aaf

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

Ghost is NOT FREE

Just reread the initial thread. Yeah, Norton Ghost is not free but it's cheap enough, less than €100 I think and it's pretty simple to use.

Also you need a license for EACH machine you image TO and/or From, so even if you have one license you can't use it on another machine.

I presume he'll only be making an image of his own machine so he doesn't need to worry about licenses.