Pc Question: Hard Drive Cloning

[dmmsta]

My PC at home seems to be suffering from an intermittent HDD failure...when I boot up it sometimes says there is no disk to boot the OS from.

What I'm after is a recommendation to a free disk cloning / ghosting software if anyone knows of one.

I know there's a few out there, but would prefer to have a pointer from someone with experience of the software.

What I intend to do (if I can) is to get a new disk, and clone the original so that I don't have to rebuild the whole OS.

Cheers in advance.


Adam

[Guest]

<!--quoteo(post=164806:date=Fri 4th Jun 2010, 06:00 PM:name=dmmsta)-->QUOTE(dmmsta @ Fri 4th Jun 2010, 06:00 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}><!--quotec-->My PC at home seems to be suffering from an intermittent HDD failure...when I boot up it sometimes says there is no disk to boot the OS from.

What I'm after is a recommendation to a free disk cloning / ghosting software if anyone knows of one.

I know there's a few out there, but would prefer to have a pointer from someone with experience of the software.

What I intend to do (if I can) is to get a new disk, and clone the original so that I don't have to rebuild the whole OS.

Cheers in advance.
Adam<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->


Hi Adam, would not be certain that the HDD is at fault, mainboard issue is possible??
And /Or Are you using Windows, use windows to do a backup in case HDD does fail.
cheers Graeme

[dmmsta]

<!--quoteo(post=164820:date=Fri 4th Jun 2010, 12:48 PM:name=graeme)-->QUOTE(graeme @ Fri 4th Jun 2010, 12:48 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}><!--quotec-->Hi Adam, would not be certain that the HDD is at fault, mainboard issue is possible??
And /Or Are you using Windows, use windows to do a backup in case HDD does fail.
cheers Graeme<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

I'm fairly sure it's the HDD, as I've a 2nd small disk in that has Ubuntu on it, and that has been fine. Have swapped cables over and issue follows the Window 7 OS rather than Ubuntu being affected.

I've got a back-up of all of the doc's pic's etc already, just can't be arsed don't want to have to reinstall the OS on a new disk unless I have too!

[Guest]

<!--quoteo(post=164824:date=Fri 4th Jun 2010, 10:08 PM:name=dmmsta)-->QUOTE(dmmsta @ Fri 4th Jun 2010, 10:08 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}><!--quotec-->I'm fairly sure it's the HDD, as I've a 2nd small disk in that has Ubuntu on it, and that has been fine. Have swapped cables over and issue follows the Window 7 OS rather than Ubuntu being affected.

I've got a back-up of all of the doc's pic's etc already, just can't be arsed don't want to have to reinstall the OS on a new disk unless I have too!<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->


Hi Adam, fair enough, win 7 built in backup does a system disk image i noticed the other day??
Graeme

[dmmsta]

Looking at the time to clone a disk, and the fact i've already got data backup, think I'm just going to rebuild the machine.

Believe the motherboard has raid potential, so get 2 new disks, raid them, and rebuild onto that...saves problems in the future...

[cypher]

<!--quoteo(post=164835:date=Sat 5th Jun 2010, 12:00 AM:name=dmmsta)-->QUOTE(dmmsta @ Sat 5th Jun 2010, 12:00 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}><!--quotec-->Looking at the time to clone a disk, and the fact i've already got data backup, think I'm just going to rebuild the machine.

Believe the motherboard has raid potential, so get 2 new disks, raid them, and rebuild onto that...saves problems in the future...<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
No experience with ghosting software, but I have a mirrored raid setup on my work pc - one disk failed a few months ago (only 4yo computer, requested and paid for it to be a high spec machine for reliability when I purchased it [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/dry.gif[/img]), the system very elegantly switched to the good disk and told me I had failure.

Pull the faulty one out and swap in a good one, easy... except I couldn't buy a new drive the same as the original pair, and they need to be identical apparently, so had to buy 2 new drives and copy data to them. Local computer shop did it for me as I had to go interstate just as it happened, but I believe they used a Norton Ghosting product to do that. So while mirroring kept the pc running until we could get it repaired, it wasn't as plug and play as I had expected it to be.

[danielcarway]

<!--quoteo(post=164806:date=Fri 4th Jun 2010, 09:00 AM:name=dmmsta)-->QUOTE(dmmsta @ Fri 4th Jun 2010, 09:00 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}><!--quotec-->My PC at home seems to be suffering from an intermittent HDD failure...when I boot up it sometimes says there is no disk to boot the OS from.

What I'm after is a recommendation to a free disk cloning / ghosting software if anyone knows of one.

I know there's a few out there, but would prefer to have a pointer from someone with experience of the software.

What I intend to do (if I can) is to get a new disk, and clone the original so that I don't have to rebuild the whole OS.

Cheers in advance.
Adam<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I use Norton Ghost at work, but of course it's a paid-for product. What I have found is PING (Partimage Is Not Ghost), which, although I've not had much chance to test, looks like the sort of chap you want.

CLICKY

I'd be interested to know if it's any good!

Daniel

[endo]

Hi caerbannog

I've used PING a few times (I have a an image of my Netbook on a usb pendrive) if you can use GHOST you can use PING it will even clone your BIOS settings......so if you are like me and forever messing about with setting and experimenting its a god send. PING has stopped development for a few years now.

PING will also clone and compress just about any format except EXT4 (for the linux freaks). You can also use CLONEZILLA which I have also used and can also say works very well (Clonezilla will clone EXT4 formats)

Hope this helps

Endo

[dmmsta]

Cheers for all the pointers peeps!