Best hard disk cloning option?

[Kadence]

I need to clone a Seagate 120GB (computer says 111GB) IDE drive (Windows XP) to a 300GB SATA Velociraptor. What's the best option? I'd rather not pay money for a software I'm just going to use one time, but I don't know if the free options are reliable. Note that the source hard drive is unpartitioned, and I don't want the new hard drive partitioned either.

Also, will I need to format the target hard drive first (don't know if Velociraptors come formatted), or will that be redundant with the cloning process?

 

[Old Hippie]

Acronis will do everything you want, and the free trial is fully functional for 15 days.

Just follow the little tabs that say "Clone Disk".

 

[BurnItDwn]

I used Acronis recently to change my Boot and App drive from a seagate 7200.10 500gb to a WD640 .... clone process was painless, unplugged my old drive .... booted right up ....

It took about 3 hours, there was about 450GB worth of data getting copied (across 2 partitions)

 

[Kadence]

Thank you. Can you use Acronis trial to create a boot disk that does the cloning? I'd rather clone from a bootable CD than inside Windows, so everything is cloned more properly.

Anyone familiar with Clonezilla, and how that compares to Acronis?

 

[Kadence]

Turns out I have a paid version of Acronis Trueimage 9.0 on my computer already from buying it back in the day. Someone know if that will work just as well as the new version, or even the new trial version?

 

[QuixoticOne]

FYI in case it helps, Acronis True Image Home 11 is $10 for the download on sale now; I just bought a couple.
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