must replace hard drives- cloning advice? please!

Hi Ev-

I've had to clone/replace a couple of drives in the past few weeks (my travails are documented in the "Computer" forum!), and I was generally very happy with Acronis True Image Home 2010's performance.

One caveat if you use it to clone a boot drive is you have to manually shut down and disconnect either the original or cloned drive before you restart, otherwise Windows will be "confused".

Another is that if you clone a problem drive the process will take *much* longer than the on-screen display predicts, but that's not a big surprise, and since it sounds like your drives are healthy you shouldn't have that problem.

Otherwise, Acronis works great, and is very fast, but that's assuming you don't have to physically remove a drive to clone it. Can you not have both the source and destination drives installed in your case at the same time?

-Susan

Hi Ev,

Yup - I agree with Susan, Acronis is a great tool for backup/cloning.
If you're upgrading to a WesternDigital drive they (WD) have a version of Acronis for free that will do the job

Fred

Hi Fred-

If you're upgrading to a WesternDigital drive they (WD) have a version of Acronis for free that will do the job

Good point! Seagate does, too, if you're using either Seagate or Maxtor drives.

-Susan

What everybody said is good advice so far.  And Acronis will work, but sometimes for me, I've had issues, so I've used Paragon Hard Disk Manager 2009, which is free sometimes, or you get it the 'PC Utilities' mags for free every now an then.  Worked really well.

Here's some suggestions:

- You'll be fine if you are cloning, so long as you keep the original drive and don't touch it until you're certain your clone/backup worked. 

- Consider using a USB-to-IDE converter or enclosure and clone your drive.  This way, you don't have to open the case and move drives around until you're certain you've got it cloned correctly.  Plus, you can use this and any old drive and backup in the future.  However, it's best you have a high-speed USB port (which your old XP machine may not) or it will take a lot longer.  Most backup/clone software works fine here.

- You're backing up XP, but I ran into an interesting issue with Win 7.  I cloned a drive to a different manufacturer, and when I put that drive in, it was saying something was wrong with the hardware, and to do a repair.  Well, once it did repair, the only thing it 'repaired' was that Win 7 needed re-authorization.  Then, it hit me why:  That's part of their anti-piracy system:  It's reading the drive serial number, and if it's different, it needs to re-authorize, to make sure you haven't cloned your Win 7 on a different machine.  Once it re-authorized, then I had no further issues.  I had not seen this before, but original XP supposedly had it.

- And since you're taking the drive out, you might consider replacing your new drive in with the rubber-isolation screws.  For me, this greatly reduced the disk drive noise.

I use Acronis True Image as do all the other Computer Techies that I know.   
 
I do part-time PC repair and support and recommend Acronis to all my clients.