Cloning software better than ghost?

B

BoostFrenzy

Weaksauce
Joined
Nov 22, 2004
Messages
119
Still using ghost from a bootable USB drive to clone damaged hard drives, is there a better product these days that works outside the operating system to recover/clone drives?
 
I use Active Boot Disk Suite. It comes with a handful of little tools and a mini os to do wiping, recovery, imaging, a few more things. Never used Ghost so I can't compare, but I like it.
 
I miss the days when we had a floppy with Ghost on it along with all the SCSI and RAID drivers we needed for all the hardware we used. Made life soooooo easy.

I miss it.

Been using Acronis of late when I've needed it.
 
First post here...

I had to clone the wife's PC drive to a newer one last week.
I was going from a Seagate older 320g to a new Samsung F4 320g(these drives rock btw!)

First up I tried going the easy and free route with HDClone 4? I think it was. This turned up write errors like crazy before it was even 50% done. I'm guessing something in her windows setup was causing this(drivers or something).

I then turned to the old favorite, and grabbed a newer copy of Acronis True Image as mentioned above. Based on the good reviews, and a coupon I found, I got it for a nice price for as useful as it seems to be.
Anyway, True Image collected necessary info for the clone, then prompted a reboot, and finished the cloning process outside of the OS, and did it in half the time.

My results were great, even though not what I intended in the first place( I got the "Don't screw with my OS" speech from her, so I couldn't reinstall Win7 with AHCI enabled for the new drive, and it's stuck in IDE mode.) Even still, the clone was perfect, and no problems so far.

Hope this helps. I used Ghost years ago, and it was cool back then, but my copy became aged and would not work with the newer OS types.
 
Last edited:
Henchman24 said:
...
My results were great, even though not what I intended in the first place( I got the "Don't screw with my OS" speech from her, so I couldn't reinstall Win7 with AHCI enabled for the new drive, and it's stuck in IDE mode.) Even still, the clone was perfect, and no problems so far.
Click to expand...

Welcome!
FYI, no reinstall necessary to switch to AHCI if you're in Windows 7: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976
 
does true image work outside the operating system? boots to live cd or something? never used it
 
yes acronis has a bootdisk creator. however since it boots into linux (or some flavor of *nix) sometimes on newer motherboards/chipsets it won't see your drives even with the SATA mode set to IDE, because they haven't added driver support yet, and sometimes it takes a few months for a new version of acronis to support the latest chipsets. Most of the legacy DOS based cloning tools like Ghost and others simply used Int13, which Acronis can't since it's not a true DOS tool and boots into an O/S as mentioned.

Most people won't run into this issue, but something to be aware of the next time you buy a new gen motherboard with a new gen chipset and you wonder why Acronis doesn't detect any drives.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top