What is the easiest (and free) way to clone a HDD?

[bluemax]

I want to take my existing hard drive and make a 100% copy to my new biggy-speedy!

I do NOT have Ghost.

What is the best option for me? Something I can run within Windows 2000....

 

[DaveSimmons]

> Something I can run within Windows 2000....

Most manufacturer utilities (which are free to download BTW) * run from a self-booting floppy. Cloning an OS partition while the OS is running is usually not the best idea.

* go to WD, maxtor, IBM, etc. and look for their "disk manager", "maxblast", etc. -- they're free.

 

[erikistired]

the last time i used wd's free disk copy utility it didn't support ntfs partitions, only fat/fat32. this was jan-feb of 2003, not sure if that's been updated.

 

[bluemax]

Not much luck. I think I'll use this as an excuse to go back to a nice, clean, new, perfectly-working install of Win98SE.

Yep. 98SE over 2000... it just plain works.

Until my WinXP Pro from the Intel Retail Edge comes my way at least.

 

[Blastman]

HDCopy will mirror your HDD to another HDD. The new HDD will be bootable (and completely de-fragged as a side benefit) ? ?

HDCopy home edition ?

http://212.223.28.218/english/HDCOPY/download.htm

 

[DaveSimmons]

Originally posted by: bluemax
Not much luck. I think I'll use this as an excuse to go back to a nice, clean, new, perfectly-working install of Win98SE.

Yep. 98SE over 2000... it just plain works.

2000 works much better than 98SE for everything except games. Your mistake was in thinking you needed NTFS instead of FAT32. With a FAT32 C: drive you could even be booting to DOS to play old games as needed.