Hard disk copy software

[Grumpybear2000]

I have a 60gb laptop hard drive with heaps of bad sectors, have already used partition magic and put everything on the good part of the drive the first 40gb. Is there a way i can do a complete copy of everything on this drive, then copy it all to another 40 gb i have. Have total of 15gb of files.

[anon]

Just use any drive imaging program.

[Grumpybear2000]

Will the new drive need to be bootable or have windows installed, how does the imaging programs work.

[anon]

Will the new drive need to be bootable or have windows installed

At long as it has a partition that's big enough to hold all the new data, that's file. Remember everything the disk has is overwritten when you restore an image to it.


how does the imaging programs work.

Basically, they copy all of a partition (or drive's) contents to a single, huge image file (often compressed to save space), so that then you can perform the opposite operation in case you need it. It's also possible to extract individual files from images.

[Expeto]

You need something filesystem unaware, meaning they it clone you disk. They are not interested in if the that sector contains remains of a 2 years of deleted file or the most important system file, they can't even see the difference. They will just clone it
I would highly suggest you to use DD (http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/coreutils.htm), which is simplest and most effective tool. Yet, the "simple" should not be confused with "easy", which DD clearly lacks

[Cabalo]

I would recommend booting from a live CD ( Ubuntu will do), and run GDDRescue (http://www.linux.com/archive/feed/152592). This will duplicate your partition to any other physical disk.
Used it more than once, and it does the job as no any other.

[anon]

I would highly suggest you to use DD (http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/coreutils.htm), which is simplest and most effective tool. Yet, the "simple" should not be confused with "easy", which DD clearly lacks

dd's very good and I used it sometimes, but for a beginner it's easy to write the wrong parameters and end up overwriting another disk by accident, for example. Also it won't compress stuff, so an image of a 40GB drive will be 40GB, even if 39 of them are empty.

[Grumpybear2000]

We better find a simple easy program i cant stuff up them lol

[anon]

Try Norton Ghost or Acronis Backup & Recovery... always been told very good things about those :)

Cabalo also recommended another one above.

[Cabalo]

We better find a simple easy program i cant stuff up them lol

I can't think of anything easier than gddrescue.

[Appzalien]

Here's a conversation about getting hidden partitions to copy. Someone mentions gddrescue as well.
http://www.eggheadcafe.com/software/aspnet/36248831/copy-hidden-partition.aspx

Hope it can help you decide, the one guy seems to really know his stuff.

You might want to save your data to an external drive for safe keeping. Anything that was associated with a bad sector will probably be corrupt, including (possibly) sections of the hidden partition.