one more question, regarding imaging

[Soylent Brice]

i have an idea to image my hard drive.

i read i could image it, store on another hard drive and then use that image on another hard drive.

has anyone ever done this before and would this work?/how long does it take?/would this mean that it would be an identical "copy" of everything i have on the original hard drive basically imaged onto another hard drive?

any help with this one would be greatly appreciated.

thanks!

[hobbit709]

1. If you make an image copy it will be identical.

Or you can store the image file on a drive and use it to restore your system if it gets hosed back to when you made the image.
what you can't necessarily do is use it to copy to another computer unless the hardware in the new computer is similar enough to not trigger the BSOD.

[Gore1FL]

2. I do it for a living.

I use Symantec Ghost. My biggest image is about 80GB. Over a (not particularly optimized) 1GB network connection it takes about an hour to come down. A lot of it depends on the speed of your drives (particularly write speed) and the the quantity of used hard drive space being copied.

There are free programs that do the same thing. I don't have good information to recommend one. Here is one that popped up on Google. I know nothing about it, but it looks like it might do the trick.

The long and short of it is you boot off of a flash drive or CD and you run the software for the disk copy.

Another option is you set up RAID 1 and have your hardware mirror your first drive. You can break the mirror by disabling one of the drives. The second becomes locked at the moment the mirror is broken.

I am more clear on the first than the second. The benefit to the first involves deployment which is a perfectly useless feature for your needs. The second is pretty much handled by hardware, and when it is done, you simply slide out the drive. If you don't have the RAID hardware now that is perfectly useless as you'd need to copy an image to the RAID set.

[Gore1FL]

3. just to be clear.

You are using this for backing up the drive? If so that's what my above post was in response to.

If you plan to actually use the copied image on another PC that gets a little trickier.

In that case you'd have to use the Sysprep utility. This won't preserve user data on the new device, but it can be migrated independently.

[Soylent Brice]

5. i'm actually

doing it to avoid having to go through the trouble of reinstalling a bunch of things i don't have the executable files for, in terms of specific programs, anymore.

i just want to put this image onto a hard drive with larger memory, basically, without the hassle of reinstalling a bunch of things that I know will take forever to find, or software I have already paid for but haven't been able to back up successfully.

I successfully used DriveImage XML to create and backup an image of the hard drive. I just haven't tried restoring it onto the new hard drive yet.

any thoughts?

[Gore1FL]

6. I thought I had responded to this. Sorry for the delay

It sounds like your only step left is to image the new HD, boot from it and test your software. The complications would have come in if you were using completely different PC hardware.

[Dead_Parrot]

4. In general, yes.

BootIt is the tool I usually use: Assuming this is going on to your 1.5TB drive you can hook the drive up, boot from the bootit CD and copy the partition straight over, then resize if you feel inclined (remember to mark the partition as active if you want it to boot). If you are moving Ubuntu you'll probably have to tinker with the drive UUIDs using a live CD, but XP and W7 usually sort themselves out after a reboot or two.

How long depends on how how much stuff there is and the system speed - it's usually 30+ mins for a 'used' OS. if you're using Bootit, there' a 'data only' option to just copy the files, not unused space/deleted files, which saves a load of time.