Hard Drive cloning software?

[bentomo]

I'm planning on upgrading a laptops hard drive soon and I'd rather clone the drive than installing windows and everything all over again.

So anyone have a favorite hard drive cloning software? I've already got a usb to sata adapter for dvd and hard drives, I just need some software.

 

[bic]

Ghost 8 is my favorite, but it's expensive. I haven't tried Acronis yet but apparently it's pretty good too.

CloneZilla works well enough for the price (free), but keep in mind a lot of the free drive cloning tools are just frontends for dd, which is slow as crap.

 

[bentomo]

Ghost 8 is my favorite, but it's expensive. I haven't tried Acronis yet but apparently it's pretty good too.

CloneZilla works well enough for the price (free), but keep in mind a lot of the free drive cloning tools are just frontends for dd, which is slow as crap.

As long as it clones the hdds exactly and it's free, I don't mind it being slow.

What about any ubuntu applications or something?

 

[bic]

Just download the CloneZilla live CD and use that.
http://clonezilla.org/

If you absolutely need a GUI, Clonezilla is included on the Parted Magic live CD. (It will run as a text mode program inside a console window, though.) As a bonus, it includes gparted, which can resize most partitions to fill your new hard drive.
http://partedmagic.com

Note: The target hard drive must be at least the same size as the one you're cloning, preferably bigger. To the best of my knowledge, there are no free tools that can clone a large hard drive to a smaller one without some sketchy workarounds (shrinking partitions, etc). Ghost can do this with no complaints, as long as the data will fit on the new drive.

 

[bentomo]

A parted magic live usb key will do the trick if it has cloning software on it. I should make a usb one, I've only got a disc version. Thanks bic

 

[oinquer]

Clonezilla is the way to go....you got a semi GUI with friendly like-DOS menus using the keyboard....i cloned 1 hard drive to about 300, doing 15 each time by network using clonezilla last year! awesome...you can clone them in the same computer very easily

Also i think clonezilla will clone a bigger drive to a smaller one...just need to activate advanced options and use another copy tool...instead of DD (which is one of the best but slow) use ntfsclone, partclone, etc....BUT you need to have space free for the files in the new drive.