What's the best way to dupe a hard drive with Win7 to another hard drive?

[SimMike2]

If you want a real challenge, try cloning a regular OS hard drive to an SSD without screwing up the proper alignment. Hard drive to hard drive is easy compared to this.

 

[bankster55]

Well, I'm not gonna dis Acronis or Paragon, or Ghost, because people get their feelings hurt if you talk bad about their fav sw.
Having said that one must differentiate between disk CLONING and DISK IMAGING copiers.
I dont like imagers - just my personal preference.
I like cloners that copy the desired DATA bit by bit to another HDD, or the whole HDD per same.
Long time ago I stumbled onto the Casper cloning app
Nobody has ever even heard of it - which says something about their lack of marketing.
http://www.fssdev.com/products/casper/features.aspx
http://www.fssdev.com/products/casper/specifications.aspx
The current vers is 6.0 and is Win 7 compatible and also X86/X64 SSD and RAID
I have cloned literally hundreds of drives and never had a single problem with Casper
You can run it while surfing the internet
You can verify as you copy
It takes everything - MBR partition table and the HDD volume numbers, all settings and options
Want to test your new booting clone? Just change boot order in bios
This thing is a joy to use, and is a must have utility.
But then again, thats just my humble opinion.
$50 well spent

FWIW they also have a networking vers for $550

 

[Harvey]

Well, I'm not gonna dis Acronis or Paragon, or Ghost, because people get their feelings hurt if you talk bad about their fav sw.

Thanks for the info and nothing to dis. The DOS version of Ghost works for me for what I need it to do on my XP machines, and the free versions of Acronis have been flawless cloning Win 7 between matched drives.

The OP wants to clone between Seagate drives. If he needs an effective, easy way to get it done, and time and money are issues, the version of Acronis in Seagate's DiscWizard is free. If it doesn't work, he should look at Casper.

 

[RobCr]

Win7 Pro Imaged with Free Seagate DiscWizard, and then Restored to a different drive.

I tried the latest DiscWizard, and had minor errors, so did not use it.
Not sure what my older version is, but I downloaded it from Seagate in May 2009. THAT WAs THE ONE I used below.

I made an image of the full drive MBR + Win7 partition + a data partition(no OS)
That is, I just ticked the box to image the whole drive.
(This was NOT a Sector by Sector image)
It took about 15 minutes to create, and the same to verify.
I then removed the drive, and put another drive into the PC.
I used Partition Magic to Delete the partitions that were previously on the new drive (Possibly I did not even have to do that ?).
I then booted with the 2009 Segate DiscWizard CD, and Restored the MBR + Win7 + Data partitions mentioned above.
That took 10 minutes, and I then booted into Win7

Hope this will assist others.

 

[JackMDS]

TrueImage version up to v11 are not fully compatible with Win 7 partitons schemes.

Trueimage Home 2010 is compatible and also the only Home version that have Universal Restore option.

So if one uses old version of Home be careful and keep a spare image file some where.

The proffessional old Echo 9.5 works well with Win 7 and also have a Universal Restore option.