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Hi - I posted a message sometime ago about cloning a hard drive - thanks for the replies which were appreciated. However, when I spoke to Microsoft they told me that cloning was illegitimate and I would have to do a fresh install otherwise I would violate the XP licence.
Here is the scenario I have:
I have two hard drives - one which I have used a lot (C) and another identical one which I have not used very much (E). I am planning to use a drive copying / cloning utility to move everything over to E. The original drive C has one or two bad sectors.
However a fresh install is not practicable because my pc is so heavily customised in its operation that it would take me months to reinstall everything from scratch, plus I have a slow internet connection (due to the area I live in) so updates would take forever!
Does anyone know if there is any legitimate way round this licencing / cloning issue?
Thanks
I believe if you clone the HDD with bad sectors, you will also move those bad sectors to the other HDD. The sectors may not be physically bad on the new HDD, but Windows will still see them as such.
Maybe this discussion will help:
Cloned a drive with bad sectors. Now the duplicate thinks it has bad sectors too
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I think MSoft gave you a bum steer. Why in the world did you contact them anyway.
Registration normally pops up when you replace multiple components. Possibly MS misunderstood and thought you wer going to use the drive in a DIFFERENT computer.
I would go ahead and I doubt you will need to register.
On another note though, if you present drive has lots of problems with it you do understand that you will be cloning all those problems.
As far as taking months to reinstall I ould venture to guess that is a grossly inflated estimate.
Your problems are a classic example of why it is good policy to run multiple partitions and to IMAGE each partition separately. Had you done that you wouldn't have your current delema.
I suggest you bite the bullet and install everything new using at least 3 partitions, possibly more, depending on what you have on the disk.
Use an imaging program like Ghost or Acronis to create images of each partition immediately after they are finalized. Then maintain current images as there are major changes to each partition.
As far as updates are concerned you can use the downloadable updates from a different locating where the connection is faster and then apply them to your machine when you get home. Below is a link to the downloadable versions.
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Ghost(and perhaps Acronis) allows you to skip bad sectors when doing an image, though that probably doesn't ensure that the bad sectors won't appear to some degree in the image. You might want to give that a try.
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Being a crotchety old man and hard-headed to boot my head tells me that cloning and imaging are two different sports.
An image gives you sector by sector transfer.
Cloning gives you byte by byte tranfer. I could be grossly mistaken but I don't think you can transfer bad sectors by byte.
from XXClone.com regarding their product..."Since XXCLONE copies files one at a time using logical file access (as opposed to sector-by-sector accesses), each file written to the target volume is positioned in contiguous sectors. That is, the target volume newly created by XXCLONE is automatically made for optimum performance as if a disk de-fragmentation procedure were performed. A "de-frag" operation by itself is usually an extremely time-consuming procedure.
XXCLONE's versatility and performance advantage are a result of XXCLONE's unique approach to the common goal of creating a backup system volume.
XXCLONE performs all necessary disk initializations in order to make the target volume self-bootable."
YMMV
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Cuffy
The main difference between cloning and imaging is cloning is duplication of the entire drive or single partition on the drive in readable form.
An image is compressed to save space as it isn't intended to be read. As far as the other subtilties are concerned that varies from utility to utility.
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Again, I think I pretty much explained the difference above.
I use Acronis TI .v 11 to make an image and I use XXClone to make a cloned copy. Two tools and two different products.
An image is not necessarily compressed. You can take a picture of your girl friend but I don't consider it as compressing her??
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"You can take a picture of your girl friend but I don't consider it as compressing her??"
Unless your G/F is 3"x5", I think her image would be compressed ;-)
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3X5 ain't good!
My problem is worse........
4X4
Compressed in one dimension,
expanded in another.
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Albroun, it sounds like all you're doing is moving everything from a likely-failing drive to a newer one. I'm going to let you in on a secret. . . PEOPLE DO THAT ALL THE TIME. New drives come with cloning software for that very purpose. There are now online backup sites to save your software in the event of a hard drive crash. As a matter of fact, backing up your drive in one form or another is something everyone should do. Microsoft will never, ever, win a lawsuit against someone doing that--and they're not going to try.
So, as they say, you need to 'grow a pair' and do what you need to do.
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Ghost does compress the image if you want. That image is later usable, after it's decompressed, of course.
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Cuffy
It has been reported that some cloning software supplied by the drive manufacturers does clone bad sectors. Not only that but they also clone the total drive capacity and leave any remaining space as unallocated. As I said the other differences vary by utility.
One other major difference is that cloning involves two harddrives. Images can be stored on most any media that is available.
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Albroun, before you image/clone your drive run chkdsk /r. It should thoroughly test all the sectors and mark any bad ones as unusable.
Start using an imaging program to backup your system occasionally.
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"As I said the other differences vary by utility."
What doesn't differ is the fact that an image is a picture of a sector on the drive. Cloning looks in the sector and copies bytes of information to another media.
TrueImage takes a picture of the clothes basket.....
XXClone copies all the dirty underwear in the basket and transfers it to another basket, on another media, and perhaps containing someone else's dirty underwear.
The utilities available do their own thing but but they can't do each other's.
How well either a cloner or an imager works depends on the expertise and assets of the developers.
Regardless of how much information is included in an image or a cloned copy the processes are as different as salt and pepper.
How Acronis or Norton's or XXClone do what they do is a topic for another discussion. What they include or exclude may or may not be desirable but the fact remains that salt is salt and pepper is pepper.
I use both processes depending on what the situation calls for.
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