Gordon_McGeachie
Joke Historian
Reged: 19/01/2007
Posts: 3950
Loc: East Yorkshire,
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What is the best way to clone my c drive so that it can be changed over, without having to buy software?
Can it be done form the msdos prompt after inserting a bootable floppy disk?
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She (Avro Vulcan XH558)Took To The Sky Like A Lovesick Angel.
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Dom_Rivers
addict
Reged: 03/04/2007
Posts: 417
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You are going to need software to clone it, the best out there is Acronis Drive Image, nice and easy to use, look for an older version (8 or 9) on Fleabay and it'll be one of the best tenners you'll ever spend on software
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beejaybee
Marvin
Reged: 18/07/2007
Posts: 4406
Loc: Really Here In Name Only
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If the disks are the same (or formatted with logical addressing rather than cylinder/head/sector addressing, and the target disk contains at least as many blocks as the source disk) then you can do this with nothing more than the debug program with any version of DOS from about 3.2 onwards. It does help if you can write 8086 assembler. The trick is to use the BIOS disk I/O routines instead of those provided by the operating system.
Whether this is the best way to do the job is a matter for conjecture. It would be very slow as you would be writing at most one sector per disk rev.
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pachinkofan
old hand
Reged: 25/08/2005
Posts: 788
Loc: Near Stirling, Scotland
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When I was buying a new drive and needed to shift all my stuff from C to the new drive, I went to the website of one of the drive manufacturers that were in my pc, and downloaded their software, as it made a copy of my C to the other drive.
[Checked that I had at least one drive made by them before it worked, hence sticking to the website of the manufacturers and not a 3rd party. That and it was free  ]
G>
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 mmm Pachinko
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Gordon_McGeachie
Joke Historian
Reged: 19/01/2007
Posts: 3950
Loc: East Yorkshire,
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Thanks for the replies.
My drive is made by seagate and I have just gone to there website and found that they have some software called discwizard (104mb) which will copy the drive to a new one
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She (Avro Vulcan XH558)Took To The Sky Like A Lovesick Angel.
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geoffL
addict
Reged: 15/06/2007
Posts: 667
Loc: Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
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Just a word of caution.. not wanting to put you off....
I did this with a seagate drive on my old XP machine and the seagate software didn't work well. After transferring to the new drive I had LOTS of probs with 'file not found' issues and blue screens. In the end I had to reformat the disc and tsart from scratch installing XP etc on the new disc. I might have just been unlucky and this was about 18 months ago so software probable upgraded since then.
All I would say is make sure you have a backup plan in case it doesn't work....!
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Geoff Love
Take a look at my other pictures at:
www.geofflove.co.uk
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DaveS
member
Reged: 22/06/2007
Posts: 196
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Can I post in here?
I'm about to buy a bigger C drive for my Dell Inspiron 9400 laptop, and plan to make a disk image using Acronis, then write back to the new drive.
What concerns me is, will I have the increased space, or will the computer only see the same sized drive that I replaced.
Currently I have a Fujutsu 100 Gig, 5400 drive, and plan to replace it with an Hitachi 200 Gig, 7200 drive
Dave
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TonyKillay
enthusiast
Reged: 05/07/2006
Posts: 280
Loc: South Wales
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When cloning, TrueImage will offer options on partioning the new disk. It sounds as your only problem is the disk size, in which case you can safely go though the cloning process without worrying about your current C drive. While I'm confident True Image won't let you down you may need to have one of those annoying phone calls with Microsoft to re-register the operating system - perhaps others can tell you more.
Tony
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DaveS
member
Reged: 22/06/2007
Posts: 196
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Thanks.
Our systems manager here regularly has to re-image the school's laptops after drives fail (They get a hell of a lot of use from the girls) , but is only going to the same-sized drive. He sugested I use Acronis, but wasn't 100% sure about the partitioning.
Dave
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