New Hard Drive - Mirroring?

[teddyv]

Hi folks, I have bought a new internal 1TB WD Green and plan on installing it in my somewhat aged 939-based AMD system. Last time I upgraded from 160g PATA to my current 200g SATA I bought a neat little program called CopyCommander in CompUSA's discount bin that worked perfectly - install the new B drive and upon first boot, just boot from the CD and select 'mirror A to B' and 'expand B to its full size' or something like that. It formatted the new B to its full size then mirrored A over. Take A out, move the new B to the main boot drive and you're off and running. Thing is, CopyCommander v.7 support on the site sucks to say the least, most questions in the QA simply point to the v.9 upgrade page.

So when I get my new drive I would like to do exactly what CopyCommander does above, but I have no idea if it will even support a 1TB drive, or whether it will work SATA to SATA, etc. Anyone have any experience with this program using new, big SATA drives, or know of another program that will do the above? I saw WD has some tool to do it, but the support docs are very lean and a leave a lot out.

I am not interested in different partitions or anything like that.

Thanks for any advice folks!

 

[techmanc]

You could try DriveImage XML. It should do the trick and it FREE!
Update: Free for home use it will Copy directly from drive to drive
Link Here
http://www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm

 

[BlueAcolyte]

You could try it?

 

[dunkster]

Download Western Digital Data Lifeguard Tools for DOS to either floppy or CD/DVD.

I attempted to load the latest version to check functions, but I have a Seagate drive installed and it won't start with the Seagate drive.

I used it some time ago for disk cloning, cloning a 40GB drive multi-partition drive to an 80GB drive. It gave me these options:
- Use all space on target drive.
- Auto-scale partition sizes or select partition sizes manually.

It's free and will probably do what you want.

Or, Google 'partition management software' for a selection of free and paid programs.

Hope this helps!

 

[rarebear]

You can use what folks said and it will work fine..

I use a Drive Copy or Imaging Program..

I make an image on a another drive (best) or partition..
This makes a fool proof back up incase Windows Restore or some other big problem and you cant boot..

You start program off Floppy or bootable CD and run program to copy Image to Replace OS..

You can copy it to a new drive and have if fit the size of the new partition or drive..

You can also store image on DVDs

There are a few that free on the web..
I use Acronis True Image but other store bought ones like Ghost or Drive Image also work fine..

 

[teddyv]

I got my new WD SE 640gig from NewEgg today, only $65 shipped and it arrived in 2 days. I downloaded and installed Acronis True Image and selected the 15-day free trial. I installed the new drive (4 screws, power cable and SATA cable), bios picked it right up with no problems. I opened Acronis, selected "Clone Disk" from the "Tools" menu, and a window opened asking me to select the source drive. I selected my current "C" drive, then it asked me for destination drive and I selected my new drive. I clicked go, rebooted, and in about 45 minutes it was all done. I rebooted, switched the boot order to the new drive, then off I went. The new drive is now "C" with everything the old has, and the old is coming out to go to the safety deposit drawer.

Voila - thanks folks for the pointers and advice!