Win 7 disc image/clone to another HDD

**buksida** · February 25th, 2010, 12:26 AM

I would like to make a clone of a Win 7 system disk to another drive and am looking for suggestions. Basically I'm replacing my hard drive and don't want to format and setup again from scratch as it takes forever to install all of the software and tweak it all.

I've tried the Windows 7 disk image recovery but this didn't work, it just recovers the over the same partition and doesn't put the image on the new disk.

I remember Norton having a program called Ghost that did this, would this work with Win 7 and if not what other options do I have?

**Platypus** · February 25th, 2010, 03:17 AM

Drive manufacturers typically provide free downloads of cloning software, e.g.:

For Seagate/Maxtor:

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/sup...ads/discwizard

For Western Digital:

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?lang=en

**slgrieb** · February 25th, 2010, 11:46 AM

Ghost is still out there of course, but I'd clone the drive using True Image from within Windows. It's faster and offers better fault tolerance than utilities run from boot disks. Plus it is excellent backup software. You can try a free, fully functional (time limited) copy at: http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing...cts/trueimage/

**buksida** · March 2nd, 2010, 07:58 AM

Thanks for the suggestions, gave Acronis TI a go. It wouldn't clone to a specific partition and wanted the whole disk so had to juggle some data about but got there in the end!

**Platypus** · March 2nd, 2010, 08:05 AM

Well, cloning is transferring the entire contents of one drive onto another drive. If you want to copy a partition across to another drive, make an image of just that partition, then restore the image to the other drive.