Has anyone cloned their C Drive Successfully

Well it seems my boot (C) Drive is making noises that it should not which means a failure could be imminent. So I really do not want to reinstall all that so I was wondering if anyone has had this issue and successfully cloned their C Drive before failure. What program is best for this? Acronis True Image etc...

I have got a D drive of course but that is pretty empty right now so it would be easy to back up and take out. I guess a new one could be temporarily put in there for the purposes of cloning. They are SATA drives as well running under Win XP 32 bit. What I am hoping for is for everything to work normally with the clone and no issues with the registry, windows etc..

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/br-free/

"Also in the control panel folder labled "recovery" you can select the "resore your files" option and create both a system image and a system repair disk."
 
OP states he is running XP 32-bit.

So I really do not want to reinstall all that so I was wondering if anyone has had this issue and successfully cloned their C Drive before failure. What program is best for this? Acronis True Image etc...

 
Hi Jeff,
 
Many of us have successfully backed up (cloned) our boot HD.
It works! 
Listen to your internal voice of experience. 
 
I've used True Image countless times (used to backup ever DAW we build).

http://www.drive-image.com/

A free 15-day trial version allows you to verify all R-Drive Image capabilities.

R-Drive Image trial version installed on Windows OS is fully functional.

R-Drive Image trial bootable version launched from startup disks (either 2 floppy disks or a CD) is fully functional but its functionality can be tested on the same PC where R-Drive Image trial Windows version is installed ONLY.


Junski

Acronis works a treat - done it a couple of times on my XP32 machine.

Not got a x64 version - is there one?

Thanks for all the help. I got Acronis and it does work very well. I ended up doing a complete drive clone. I took out my D Drive (Audio Drive) and put a new SATA 500 gig in its place.
Before doing a clone it is worth cleaning up the registry and getting rid of a lot of unnecessary files. I also did a defrag on the C Drive as well.

I did not create an image as such but just cloned the C Drive onto the new D Drive. Putting the D drive back into C position and putting the original audio drive back into D worked perfectly. A couple of re registrations was all that was required. (Korg Wavestation for some reason) but apart from that the new drive works perfectly. Just like before.

It is interesting as just as about I was to do all this my C drive started to behave and went totally quiet! I suspect now it may have been something else. They just slide into these bays and instead of having screws that hold them in, the drives have these little lugs that screw in and slide into the bay and they click in. A couple of them were very loose hence they may have been rattling. But this got me into the whole backup and clone thing and I am quite happy knowing I have got a perfectly working drive that mirrors the original.

The old drive was an older 80 gig model and the new one is a flash 500 gig model. It is super quiet but definitely works faster. So I can use the 80 G as a backup now just in case. Bootup is very noticably faster.

LJB


After a massive crash some while ago, the guys on this forum turned me on to Acronis. Just cloned my C Drive again (I do it weekly also) before I saw this post. The peace of mind is unbelievable - and it's really cheap.

Weekly clone not enough for my data so I use synctoy every evening.
John

Jeff, 

I had a C drive that  was working ok.... it was just about 90% filled up. I bought a new WD drive (IIRC) mainly because it came with a cloning software disk. The promise was for a painless cloning.

So I bought it, and followed the directions. I had to swap the drives and change the jumpers (older drives). 

In a total of about 15 minutes I had completed the process, and installed the new drive and rebooted the computer. It came up perfectly, and the desk top looked exact to the old one. ALL the programs ran perfectly except one.  All I had to do was reinstall that one program from the original disks and I was up and running. 

I would not hesitate to clone a C drive with the proper software. Do it before the drive fails, because then you have to reinstall everything......manually.