What is the easiest, safest way to clone my SATA HD boot drive?

I have a 320GB SATA HDD that has WinXPPro and Xandros (a Linux OS) wherein I can boot to either system on this drive. I am interested in upgrading to one of Western Digital's 1TB Green Caviar HDD's. I would like to know the easiest, safest way to clone my present boot drive to a larger drive since there are two kinds of formatting.

What worked for you? Thanks in advance. Asked by HealingMindN 30 months ago Similar questions: easiest safest clone SATA HD boot drive Computers > Hardware > Desktops & Laptops.

Similar questions: easiest safest clone SATA HD boot drive.

BEST way to clone hard disk Looking for best way to clone/restore complete harddisks with all installed apps and settings and partitions in 3 ways:1) when hard disk fails can just switch to another hard disk that contains the cloned image.2) when hard disk fails can insert an empty unpartitioned hard disk and boot up restore software from USB clip and clone hard disk image from DVD to the new hard disk and then boot from the hard disk like nothing had happened.3) when hard disk fails can insert an empty unpartitioned hard disk and boot up from DVD and clone hard disk image from that DVD to the new hard disk and then boot from the hard disk like nothing had happened. A lot of things have been mentioned in the forums from gparted, sysresccd, partimage, ghost, Mkcdrec, Clonezilla to manual backup scripts. But which is the best?

Sources: ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=500621 .

Easiest way to cone SATA HD boot drive is to use Ranish Partition Manager. Some hard drive manufacturers like Seagate, Western Digital and Maxtor provide free utilities to their customers for cloning the old hard-drive and and transferring the image to the new disk. » Ranish Partition Manager - This is particularly useful if you have more than one operating system on a PC since it supports Linux, Windows, FreeDOS and FreeBSD.

Ranish has a command line interface and it simulates disk partitioning using large files before working on the real hard drive partition tables. With Ranish, you can copy, move, and resize existing disk partitions. No fancy GUI here.

» HD Clone - The HDClone Free Edition supports IDE/ATA/SATA hard disks and is intended for home users. There are no limitations except on the data copy limit which is restricted to 300 MB per minute. Besides copying complete drives, it is also possible to apply it to certain partitions only.

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/08/clone-hard-drive-with-free-disk.html Sources: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/08/clone-hard-drive-with-free-disk.html .

1 I don't have personal experience with this but Acronis True Image software may work. They say it handles Windows NTFS and Linux filesystems. "True Image .... also work(s) with any other unknown file system in a special sector-by-sector mode.

If the software cannot identify the file system, it simply creates an exact image of every sector on the disk. "See kb.acronis.com/content/1538 .

I don't have personal experience with this but Acronis True Image software may work. They say it handles Windows NTFS and Linux filesystems. "True Image .... also work(s) with any other unknown file system in a special sector-by-sector mode.

If the software cannot identify the file system, it simply creates an exact image of every sector on the disk. "See kb.acronis.com/content/1538.

I have a xp pro sata raid 1 (mirror). I bought a sata storage drive. It just about blows the computer up.It won't boot.

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I have a xp pro sata raid 1 (mirror). I bought a sata storage drive. It just about blows the computer up.It won't boot.

Is there any upside to using 60GB IDE as Win7 boot drive. Or should I just use a 1TB SATA for boot+data?

My boot PATA, via an adapter, runs on the SATA controller. Can I clone it to a bootable SATA HDD? My PATA's going bad.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.