cloning hard drive

[jonnyboy]

Guys, I know we have a few pc friendly chaps here

I bought a new 750gb hard drive for my dell inspiron yesterday which is almost full (60gig).
Any thoughts on how to clone the drive over to save starting afresh? Have googled but struggling, being a technophobe...

TIA

 

[removed]

CCC - Carbon Copy Cloner is the best I have used. I would also recommend rsync, but I suspect your OS is not Linux (or Unix-based)?

In any case you DO NOT want something that will run from within your (Windows?) OS.

 

[gaz_l]

Hard drive cloning isn't particularly difficult, but as you describe yourself as a technophobe it might be best left to others. It's quite easy to end up with a blank disk if you don't know what you're doing..

I use a product called Acronis True Image, but there are many on the market. What you will need to do is run the cloning application on another machine, connecting your old and new drives to that machine as well as its system disk. You can then clone across from old to new easily. I don't know of a way to clone your existing drive to your new one without another machine, sorry .

You can download True Image on a 30 day trial for free..

Complete hard disk drive copy, cloning and image backup software: computer files and disk copying

Cheers,

Gaz

 

[Rory]

Hard drive cloning isn't particularly difficult, but as you describe yourself as a technophobe it might be best left to others. It's quite easy to end up with a blank disk if you don't know what you're doing..

Agree with that - once you're in Acronis True Image it's not difficult enough to get the drives mxed up.

Depending on the make of the drives (either the old one or the new one) you can often get Acronis True Image free off the drive manufacturers website.

Put the new drive in a USB caddy (itself a can of worms, as some work and some don't, especially on large drives) and Clone from the smaller one to the larger one.