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easiest, simplest 'tard proof way of copying a hard drive

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MonMotha:

--- Quote from: Ummon on July 03, 2009, 10:25:13 pm ---
--- Quote from: severdhed on July 03, 2009, 07:47:38 pm ---you can copy a laptop drive several ways.  if it is a sata hard drive, you can simply take it out of the laptop and connect it to your desktop just like a normal hard drive (assuming you have sata ports on your desktop).
--- End quote ---

Couldn't you just go through ethernet to a drive in another PC?

--- End quote ---

It is difficult (though not impossible) to cleanly image a drive while the filesystem is active.  One could use a "live CD" or USB boot type thing to do this, however.  I've done this before.  Of course, if you just want to copy a bunch of files, no issues at all.

severdhed:

--- Quote from: Ummon on July 03, 2009, 10:25:13 pm ---
--- Quote from: severdhed on July 03, 2009, 07:47:38 pm ---you can copy a laptop drive several ways.  if it is a sata hard drive, you can simply take it out of the laptop and connect it to your desktop just like a normal hard drive (assuming you have sata ports on your desktop).
--- End quote ---

Couldn't you just go through ethernet to a drive in another PC?


--- End quote ---

while this may technically be possible, it would be relatively difficult to set up and may not work too well....plus it would take alot longer to copy that it would if both drivers were physically connected to the same PC.

if you need an exact duplicate of a drive, acronis is by far the best way to go.  i have never had to reactive windows when doing this...guess i just got lucky. (unless i was installing the hard drive in a different pc....then there are other problems as well)

drventure:
I know Vista isn't high on the popularity list round these parts, but it does have a "Backup Entire Computer" which is pretty cool

You can run it interactive or from the command line and it'll clone your entire C drive (including boot stuff), to a VHD on another drive.

That file you can then Mount using Virtual PC to get at individual files in it.

If you ever need to restore, you just boot to the Vista Boot disk and walk through the prompts.

Pretty slick.

Windows 7 will even have a "Boot to VHD" feature, so you can literally boot to different OS's that are set up WITHIN VHD files on your actual harddrive.

protokatie:
This may be an odd way to go about it, but what about setting up a software RAID1 (many OS's have this as a built in feature) with the two drives in it, and then just break the array and rely on one of the discs. This give an advantage that if the primary disc dies, you could hook up the other disc in the array plus a new disc (or the old primary reformated if it isnt actually dead) and have it reimage again just as a basic function of RAID1.

Ummon:

--- Quote from: drventure on July 03, 2009, 11:40:22 pm ---I know Vista isn't high on the popularity list round these parts, but it does have a "Backup Entire Computer" which is pretty cool

You can run it interactive or from the command line and it'll clone your entire C drive (including boot stuff), to a VHD on another drive.

That file you can then Mount using Virtual PC to get at individual files in it.

If you ever need to restore, you just boot to the Vista Boot disk and walk through the prompts.

Pretty slick.
--- End quote ---

It's about time.



--- Quote ---Windows 7 will even have a "Boot to VHD" feature, so you can literally boot to different OS's that are set up WITHIN VHD files on your actual harddrive.

--- End quote ---

Yeah, Scott Hanselman in the .NET Rocks program was talking about this at some length. Pretty neat ---steaming pile of meadow muffin---.

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