Hard disk cloning

[Zaranthos]

Well the king of cloning software Norton Ghost is dying due to the fact that Symantec bought it and is no longer updating it. They now sell a backup solution with the same name that doesn't really clone hard drives. Since the old Ghost versions don't work with SATA hard drives I've been on a long journey to find alternatives.

I've used Clonezilla a few times and it works fairly well but doesn't cope well with multiple partitions or errors on the drive(s). DriveImage XML works pretty well but fails on bad sectors. EaseUs Disk Copy saved my day recently. I had a failing hard drive with bad sectors that nothing else would clone and it went over the bad sectors, let me ignore the errors and kept going. The only bad thing is that it won't resize partions to fill larger drives on the fly like Ghost does. EaseUs Disk Copy works almost too well since it even cloned the bad sectors so my new drive has sectors that are marked bad when they shouldn't be. Oh well, 4kb bad sectors on a 500GB hard drive is nothing.

[AceLogan]

I don't do much Windows stuff any more, but you could get a Linux Boot disc and use dd to back everything up. I'm sure someone has written a GUI front end to it as it's too useful not to.

Failing that, you can get one of your Mac-using friends to help you out. Disk cloning is built into the OS too via Disk Utility, or Super Duper works really good too.

[ddragon]

Norton Ghost 2003 Dos version can clone SATA harddisk

I have been using it for quite sometime, it works well for me.

http://rs123.rapidshare.com/files/60211976/Norton.Ghost.2003.789.Boot.Disk.exe

[Zaranthos]

I have Ghost 2003 and it hangs whenever I run it with a SATA hard disk attached.

[ddragon]

It does no problem for me. i can clone SATA to IDE/SATA/USB/PATA or image. And theoretically RAID5 to RAID5 can be done also,  but have no chance to try. as long as Ghost can see both harddisk, it can be cloned.

[Zaranthos]

My guess is that it likely has issues with certain chipsets or SATA controllers which is why it doesn't work for me. Unless it's a memory issue or something. I think I boot from a Windows 98 boot disk. I could trim some of the standard boot disk drivers I don't need and see if that helps.

[ddragon]

then link that i post is Ghost boot disk maker, it will create a boot disk + Ghost.