Making a mirror image of hard drive

I bought a new hard drive and I'm wanting to copy everything over from my old hard drive including Windows so that I don't have to reinstall anything. Which program do you recommend to use for this? I've heard of a free program called Clonezilla. Has anyone used it?

Usually the easiest solution is the copy/image utility provided by your new HD maker, you can usually find it on their website and it will only work with drives manufactured by them.

I've also had success with Macrium Reflect Free

Thank you kludger.

I use acronis, works great...

Doesnt windows 7 have that built in

Yes, but neither the compression nor the speed are great, and Microsoft "deprecated" (intentionally broke) the one alerting function Windows Backup had to tell you if your backups had a problem.

This idea of making a mirror image of your drive with the OS installed and other such things is a grand idea. I never had a need before but I needed a backup computer for getting online to work. I picked up an old but nice looking Dell that had Vista on it. Good enough for my work need. But the hard drive was dead. No big deal as I got it for $25 and that included OK monitor. I picked up a refurbished hard drive of 140 GB for $25. At the moment I am doing a CLONE using the program Kludger recommended. It was a little confusing but I got through the confusion. Thanks PM for the idea and Kludger for pointing to the program.

I also need to transfer over the OS. I don't think Windows backup lets you do that.

+1 for Acronis True Image. As long as you have a Western Digital (or Seagate) HD, you can download whichever version of Acronis True Image for free and make a bootable (Master Boot Record) clone of one drive to another. They don't even have to be the same size or brand.

Most Drives have software for download,

In order the Completely Mirror Windows + Boot Data you'd have to run w/ Windows Offline.

Some programs copy everything then reboot to a offline mode to copy the rest, other's boot to offline mode and copy.

WD Drives comes with Acronis True Image WD Edition Free
Seagate Comes with SeaTools
Samsung has their own Data Migration Tool.

With me having worked with all of them,
I'm glad I Run WD Drives, the Acronis True Image WD Edition Allows me to do everything, Copy, Re-Size, etc.

AFAIK, it only Copies Non O/S Related stuff.

So, it'd be like:
Backup, Select everything, Save a Big Backup File.
Install Windows on New HDD, Update
Goto Backup, and Import Everything back *(Software, Registry Entries etc).
It's not perfect, and makes its share of problems/mistakes as some software puts files in folders Windows Backup wont touch.

Did this on my brother's Alienware Laptop, and still ended up wiping and re-installing a week later due to missing files..

I realize I'm way too late to this thread, but it amazes me that this information is still not all-known...

Go to Win7 Control Panel, select Backup, "System Image". It creates a VHD file on another disk that includes all the OS, and you can even pick single files out of the package.

Then use the Win7 installation/boot CD on am empty drive to restore.

Easy as cake.

Have you ever tried to make a cake?

I find this a LOT easier than cake!



The Jedi Master