Hi all,

I need to clone my dad's dying 20gb drive to an 80gb drive. What software can I use thats *easy*? The 20gb drive is in the windows xp laptop. The 80gb drive is sitting on its own but I have a USB enclosure I can use.

TIA

You can get a 30-day trial of Ghost.

Awesome. Thank you

When I had this issue, I used Acronis True Image. Again, free trial available. It was smart enough to deal with the partition resizing automatically.

(Once you get the data successfully extracted, you should run a backup, and you might then consider doing a reinstall from scratch, on the off-chance you've got corruption in system files or whatnot that you're copying forward.)

Keep in mind that if the drive is "dying", there might be issues when trying to use a complete drive-cloning utility. I think that what you're looking for isn't actually a "clone", what you need is data recovery.

You want a fresh installation of XP on the new drive, not a copy of the already-corrupted installation from the bad drive. Then you want to copy whatever data files you can save off of your old drive onto the new drive. (Just data, no programs or OS files.)

I had a very similar situation where a friend had a dying laptop drive, and they wanted to rescue the important data files and photos off of the drive. The dying laptop would not boot at all.

Based on a piece of advice from a data recovery thread on this very BBS, I used the product Trinity Rescue Kit. I made a bootable CD of the Trinity Rescue Kit, popped it in the dead laptop, plugged in the "good" external USB drive, booted into the Trinity CD, and typed the following:

mountallfs
mc

...and got a great text-based UI for copying files to the good USB drive quickly and painlessly. It's now one of the favorite tools in my arsenal.

Ghost is pretty smart about corruption, in my experience. It doesn't just arbitrarily do a byte-by-byte copy. In fact, if all you did is what you said, Ghost would have worked just fine. You performed no advanced data recovery at all.

Agreed it wasn't advanced data recovery. But the primary difference between Ghost and what i did is the ability to choose what to rescue. Cloning would get you an exact copy of a possibly corrupted and malfunctioning OS.

But you could have done the same thing by installing the new hard drive, installing Windows on it, then attaching the old drive via USB and copying.

I mean, there's nothing wrong with what you did, and is more along the lines of what I would do (and have done), but it's not exactly easy. Assuming that the old drive is failing and he hasn't already lost data, Ghost or Acronix True Image is far easier. No Windows reinstallation and driver installation required.

Then again, just ignore me. I've been kinda grumpy lately.

if I had relied on windows to do the copying, I would have had to wait an annoyingly long time each time the copy operation hit a bad sector on the bad drive. The bootable cd recovery software was much more civilzed about it, so the process went a lot faster.

Hmmm I cloned the drive using Ghost but the new drive fails to boot. I see the Windows XP screen with the logo and blue bar and right before it should finishing booting the screen goes black and hangs. Any ideas? I told Ghost to copy the MBR and to make the drive bootble. Any ideas?

...

If the Ghost copy isn't working, then you've probably got some corruption in the Windows files. That means you want to perhaps go back to the original drive, try to extract just the personal files, and otherwise reinstall everything from scratch.

I guess some of the windows files are corrupt. I would try doing an in-place upgrade (reinstallation).