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Hard Drive Cloning Software

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by eraser3498

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I'm looking for some hard drive cloning software that won't tranfer bad sectors from the old drive to the new one. Thanks for the help.

11 replies

by thechas

Give Acronis True Image a try.

We are finding it to be very good for our critical systems.

Chas

by r. a. caluste

Use any hard drive cloning software. It will not copy the bad sectors (ie, not transferring physical damage but only the flag) but it will mark the good sectors in the new hdd as bad. After cloning you should use HDD Regenerator (http://www.tomdownload.com/utilities/file_disk_management/hdd_regenerator.htm) or Disk Repair (http://www.unistal.com/disk_repair.html) in the new hdd.. It should recheck all sectors and UNMARK those sectors found not bad at all (logical bad sectors).

by absolutely

Acronis True Image & Norton Ghost are both easy to use. Any disk imaging software will identify any data it can, and copy as bytes, not as sectors. When restored, they will just be bytes. Bad sectors are a physical attribute of the drive, and dat on bad sectors will either be copied as nonsense, or correctly as data, depending how "bad" the sectors are.

by k9fe1

I have had good results with both Norton Ghost and Powerquest Drive Copy. (I don't know if Drive Copy is still available since the demise of Powerquest.) They both will try and make an acurate clone. Processing time is much lower with Drive Copy. (I believe version 4.0 was the last one released.) Even used to clone a Server 2000 drive with excellent results - Microsoft say this is a no-no, so I did it and it worked.

by xt john

Another vote for Norton Ghost. We've recovered several bad drives by ghosting it over, and the new copy was problem free.

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