Bit-for-bit Copying

[Tokenekie]

My PC had a power shortage a week ago and my primary HD got screwed up badly. It is an old parallel drive and usued to run at an average speed but now it reads really slow. It takes about 6 minutes to competely boot up my PC.

I want to buy a new SATA HD and I want to copy all the data from the old primary HD onto this one bit-for-bit. I dont want to have to reformat over any of my old data and I want to still be able to run the OS as I could before, just on a new HD.

I've heard about cloning but I couldnt find much info on it. Do I have to buy a separate program to do that? Or do most new HD's come with its own program?

[rightcoast]

You should look into Ghost if you can afford it, or look into the Ultimate boot CD, G4L, partimage, or CloneZilla. HTH.

Oh yeah BTW, cool handle. I went to the elementary school you are probably reffering to. Had to mention that.

[glc]

Most hard drive manufacturers offer free tools to clone their drives (download the software from the new drive's manufacturer). Commercial software such as Ghost and Acronis True Image can clone any brand drive.

Note that if you have a corrupted hard drive, the clone process may fail, or you may wind up with a corrupted clone. Go ahead and try, but be prepared to reinstall Windows and recover your data from the old drive manually.

[Tokenekie]

Ah, Yeah it worked. I used Acronis True Image instead though. Worked perfectly.


Funny thing was I made up the name Tokenekie by putting together a few words. Few weeks later I searched for my name in Google but the auto spell-check led me to the Tokeneke Elementary school. I did some research on it because I was bored, pretty interesting.

I wanted to know where that school got its name