Clone HD Free Utility

phil19934 · Post by **phil19934** » Thu Jan 06, 2005 11:43 pm

Anyone know of a good, free hd utility. Installed new hard drive, and want to transfer all data/operating system (XP Pro) to the new hard drive. I heard a lot about Norton Ghost, wondering if anyone knows a good free one. Thanks

Phil

The Dude · Post by **The Dude** » Fri Jan 07, 2005 3:02 pm

Go to the hard drive makers web site, many have free utility's to do that.

phil19934 · Post by **phil19934** » Fri Jan 07, 2005 5:23 pm

I looked. No joy. It's a Samsung.

The Dude · Post by **The Dude** » Fri Jan 07, 2005 5:34 pm

If the other drive is a different brand you can use that manufacturers utility to do it. Other options are Norton Ghost, Partition Magic, or Acronis true image, non of which are free.

phil19934 · Post by **phil19934** » Sat Jan 08, 2005 8:58 am

Unfortunately, the other one is a Quantum, and I couldn't find anything there either.

The Dude · Post by **The Dude** » Sat Jan 08, 2005 10:12 am

Quantum, is Maxtor, and you can download Maxblast from them. They have a Windows version and a bootable ISO version.

phil19934 · Post by **phil19934** » Sat Jan 08, 2005 4:05 pm

Great! Thanks, I saw the one from Maxtor, but it said one of the drives had to be a Maxtor, but I didn't try. Thanks again.

Phil

The Dude · Post by **The Dude** » Sat Jan 08, 2005 5:04 pm

Hopefully it will work, if it doesn't post back and we'll see if we can't find something that will.

phil19934 · Post by **phil19934** » Mon Jan 17, 2005 10:43 am

Well, I tried it with no luck. It seemed to be working, but then is said my drive had errors, try defraging and scandisk. I used the XP defrag, and scandisk with automatically fixing errors about 5 times, but still got the same error. Then I tried Norton diskdoctor and speed disk, and still had the same problem.

Any suggestions? Thanks.

Phil

PS. IDE\DISKQUANTUM_FIREBALLP_LM30.0________________A35.0700\5&60546BC&0&0.0.0

is the old drive and

IDE\DISKSAMSUNG_SP1614N_________________________TM100-30\5&60546BC&0&0.1.0

Is the new one. Is there much speed differance between the two? Should I just not bother with transfering the operating system and stuff? The new one has 8 meg buffer, I have no idea what the first one has, but lucky if it's one (it's about 4 years old).

The Dude · Post by **The Dude** » Mon Jan 17, 2005 11:32 am

You could run one of these Samsung utilities to check the drive for errors. You may find what you want here.

phil19934 · Post by **phil19934** » Mon Jan 31, 2005 10:32 pm

Well, I've tried too many times, but it keeps failing to copy. It stops and says the source drive has errors, too fragmented, but on every hard drive utility I run (even did a complete surface scan) it comes up clean, and I've defraged it with several different defrags without luck.

One thing I was wondering: I have XP Pro, and I did have some individual files encrypted by XP. Would that make a problem? I unencrypeted everything I could find, but I don't know if I found everything. Is there a way to search for encrypted files? Thanks.

Phil

The Dude · Post by **The Dude** » Tue Feb 01, 2005 8:09 am

Hmmm, if the drive checks out Ok maybe you have another problem. A bad stick of ram maybe? I would if you can put the two drives on separate cables, separate channels. If you put them on the same cable it would slow things down. Also you don't want any other programs running in the background that may write to the drive being cloned. I don't know if encrypted files would cause problems. If you were using a program like Trueimage or Partition Magic I would say no, probably not. XP has a "files and settings transfer wizard" that can transfer some program settings and files to the new (PC) harddrive. Google it to see what it does and how to use it. The XP help section should have info also. The old drive likely has a 2 meg cache, I think thats the standard.