Hard Disc Cloning - Acronis Migrate Easy

[YellowDog]

Anyone on here used Acronis Migrate Easy?

I did today on a free 15 day trial.

I was having some serious sh!t, cloning my disc to a larger one for my laptop, using Norton Ghost.

It took forever to run and the told me that I had been successful - WRONG :NO: It just wouldn't start up, even after FIXBOOT and FIXMBR.

After 10 minutes of web searching, I came up with Acronis Migrate Easy - 'EASY AS' and Highly Recommended :yes:

[iYRe]

I've used acronis true image home (use the 2011 version not 2012 or 2013) to do a hardware agnostic backup of a system, then a restore to another machine (or to a VM as well).

Probably done it 20-30 times.. the newer versions dont work too well but 2011 is fine.

Shadow protect is the one most IT pros are going to now, but ATIH 2011 will do the trick (and I have a copy)

[p.dath]

We've used the Acronis product a lot, and it works great for what your discussing.

Ghost is pretty much a dead product.

If you don't need a product to do backups (which most Acronis products do), and just need to re-size partitions or copy data between disks then I highly recommend the free product GPartD. Just download the live CD and boot from that.
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/
Of the disk copying/resizing products, I've found this to be the best. Basically you queue up everything you want it to do, click Go, and go away until it finishes everything.

[clonak]

+1 on gparted, awesome tool. Saved my ass a couple of times.

I have used clonezilla/ (http://clonezilla.org/) to clone hard drives before, works quite nicely. I just used the live CD when I was upgrading from my hard drive. I always prefer to support the open source community.

[Akzle]

linux. Dd if=drive1 of=drive2. Then partition magic or similar to rewrite mbr and file table. Easier. Ghost is poo

[James Deuce]

Acronis is great.

An external 2-bay eSATA hard drive caddy is simpler.

[iYRe]

acronis and shadowprotect have an agnostic restore. They do not restore any drivers etc, so you have restore the system to dissimilar hardware than what you started. We had some dodgy boxes that someone had installed as servers.
Acronis'd them on to a USB drive, grabbed a proper server, restored from the USB drive, installed the proper drivers for network/video done. Took about 4 hours for a 1TB backup and restore. 2 years later, machine is still running flawlessly.

[James Deuce]

acronis and shadowprotect have an agnostic restore. They do not restore any drivers etc, so you have restore the system to dissimilar hardware than what you started. We had some dodgy boxes that someone had installed as servers.
Acronis'd them on to a USB drive, grabbed a proper server, restored from the USB drive, installed the proper drivers for network/video done. Took about 4 hours for a 1TB backup and restore. 2 years later, machine is still running flawlessly.
Yeah it's brilliant in that respect. Even more brilliant is that it is simple to use, which is what you want at 3am. It also has big icons and check boxes which again, is what you want when the coffee shakes are getting bad at 3:05am..

[scracha]

Yeah it's brilliant in that respect. Even more brilliant is that it is simple to use, which is what you want at 3am. It also has big icons and check boxes which again, is what you want when the coffee shakes are getting bad at 3:05am..

Rebundled versions of the Acronis software are availble for free from their respective websites if you have a Seagate, Intel, Western Digital or Adata drive (you can even just plug in a qualifying USB drive if none of your main drives are of the correct brand)

Failing that, I'd suggest the following freeware
http://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/index.htm
or
http://www.miray.de/download/sat.hdclone.html

Bother are available bundled with the http:/.ultimatebootcd.com