Heya mates!

I've got the following problem: My main disk is broken... it's basically still running, but with high latency, very low reading speed and bringing one core to 100% load if it has to read/write too much data.

As I don't want to reinstall my XP (waiting for 7) I wanna clone my old 250GB disk to my brand new Samsung F1 1000GB.

1) Anybody knows a good (free) tool for this? I found a selection through Google (Link), but I don't know any of these tools.

2) Is it possible to completely clone my old disk keeping partitions (aka drive letters) although my new disk is much bigger?

Haven't done any disk cloning yet so forgive mah stupid questions. ^^

Cheers
Blacky

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SaintK: I'm completely lost

Used to Use Norton Ghost at my old work, although it looks not to be free in the traditional sense of the word.. however all software is "free" >.>

Isn't cloning a bit too hardcore? I mean, you want everything copied bit by bit (even free space and partition tables) but everything you need is to copy the existing data only, no?

Here is a tool from Western Digital. I don't know if you have western digital hdd or if it works for western digitals only, but (works) give it a try.
Start the program and go through the Iinitiate Drive wizard.
Say you want to create a new boot partition.

[Optional ; can be already done before]
Create a primary partition of same size or more as/than the old one.
Create another (logic/extended) partition with the rest of the space. You can create more if you want to, don't see the point but w/e.
If you want the exactly same partition layout I suggest you manually measure and create them.
But can't you just make one big second partition with the rest of the space and be done with it?
[/optional]

When you finish the program starts copying the existing C:\ from the old drive (and that includes MBR) to the new partition.
The rest of the partitions I don't know if they are copied as well but that doesn't matter, you can copy them manually later.
The important thing to achieve is to copy everything that is C:\ including the bootsectors, thing that this program does.

After you're done with copying the rest of the data to the new hdd you just need to modify booting priorities in BIOS, or just disconnect the old hdd.

Good Luck!

If you want guiding images of the process, I can provide them.

you should know dd, don't you, Blacky?

http://www.osalt.com/ghost
List of open source alternatives to the commercial Norton Ghost.

Thanks for the tips... I used Clonezilla and all went fine. Just took some time...

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SaintK: I'm completely lost

if your disk is really at the end of it's life and it has a really hard time reading and thus making a clone there is 1 trick i remembered alto it sounds weird but Ive seen it work quite allot of times.

grab one of those plastic baggy's you use in the freezer, put your disk in it and suck all the air out then close it up real good (don't let any moist get near it!) then put it in the freezer for about 15-30 minutes and your disk might get some better performance again for a short amount of time, untill it heats up again basically.

i know it sounds fubar but it's a tech trick we sometimes used when we had a really really bad disk we had to clone so we used this trick as a last resort.

good luck cloning!

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"Fuck" -Alexander k

Thanks for the funky tip, but the cloning went fine... only took ages for one partition, which was cloned with 250 Mb/s instead of 3000+ like the other ones.

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SaintK: I'm completely lost