Installing A New Hd

[astral]

My hard disk is playing up and must be replaced.

I want to make an Image of all the data on disk to be able to restore it

on the new disk once installed, rather than having to install all the programmes again.

I have a large external disk to take the image.

What SW do you recommend I use?

Thanks

[Langsuan Man]

Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost are my preferred choices but if you want a free open source alternative try DriveImage XML available here:

http://www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm

[briley]

Most hard disk manufacturers will let you download a free copy of Acronis True Image from their website that only works if you have one of their hard drives.

[Daffy D]

Macrium Reflect Free

Almost identical to Acronis but for free

[nikster]

This is really old, but it worked perfectly for me the one time I tried. And it's free: It clones your windows system disk to another HD.

http://www.xxclone.com/

For you case you can either go via your external drive, or put the new HD in an external box, clone your system disk, swap disks, done. That's what I did, worked a charm. But caution, it's been a few years. I don't think MS made their file systems harder to clone meanwhile but you never know

[dave_boo]

Clonezilla. Absolutely free and quick.

[Crossy]

If you have Windows 7 (not sure if all versions have it) you can make a system image with no extra software.

[astral]

Thanks

I have Acronis TrueImage 8 and it works like a dream on XP,

but refuses to run on W7.

I have been trying to download the latest trial version but it is a massive 400Mb

I am now downloading the Macrium and will try that.

I did look at the W7 builtin version but it was not clear how I install

the image to a new disk.

Thanks for all the suggestions.

I will report back in due course.

[Crossy]

I did look at the W7 builtin version but it was not clear how I install

the image to a new disk..

The last step of creating the image is to make a restore/rescue disk. You boot from it after installing your new drive and follow the prompts

I've done it several times and it works very well.

[astral]

The disk was so bad that I was unable to image it,

Macrium gave multiple CRC errors.

The W7 imaging just hung......... No errors

just telling me there were 40 minutes to go, even after 2 hours or more.

I was able to copy most of the important data to my external disk

then inserted the new disk and booted to factory settings from the W7 installation disks.

Fortunately there were not too many programmes to reinstall.

Thanks