Clone/Transfer Data & Hard-Drive??

[MA-Caver]

Wondering if this is a good thing? I don't have the disks that are associated with the programs on my computer. My computer a few years ago crashed and a friend was able to help bring it to life by upgrading and installing the original programs that I lost. Now that friend is *ahem* out of reach/touch... so what I need to do is get a new hard-drive because 1. my space is nearly run-out and 2. every once in a while I can hear a whining noise from the tower in the vicinity of the hard-drive. Ergo my present computer's days are numbered.
Saw this and wondered... but want to get the opinion of those better knowledgeable than I on this...

Clone / Transfer / Backup Your Data and Hard Drive


Clone / Transfer / Backup EVERYTHING including data, files, settings, and programs from your old hard drive to a new one. Support files, data, partition, Windows, or entire hard disk Clone / Transfer / Backup.

Restore everything at any time or crash. No need to reinstall Windows and programs. Simple restore it! Save big time and money.
http://www.spotmau.com/products/images/package/full/disk_backup_restore_s.gifhttp://www.spotmau.com/images/enlarge.gif(Disk Clone & Backup) (http://www.spotmau.com/products/images/package/full/disk_backup_restore_l.jpg)


Clone / Transfer / Backup entire hard disk / Windows to a new one.
Clone / Transfer / Backup under Windows.
Clone / Transfer / Backup under this bootable CD when you can't get into Windows.
Backup data / partition / Windows / entire hard disk to storage.
Backup / Transfer to almost any storage media, including CDR/RW, DVD+-R/RW, USB and FireWire devices...
Restore from backup at any time or accident such as system crash or virus attack. No need to reinstall your Windows.
Backup on demand or on schedule.
Support Windows ME, NT, 2000, XP, 2003 and Vista.
Support P-ATA (IDE), S-ATA, SCSI, IEEE1394 (FireWire), USB 1.0/2.0 drives and PC card storage devices...

WOW!!

Now you do NOT have to reinstall Windows and programs to your new hard disk!

[Kurai]

I'm not familiar with that particular application so I don't have any say with it.

One that I'm fond of is http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php (http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php)

Open source and completely free. I've used it to copy partitions, resize (shrink or expand) partitions, etc.

Never had a problem using it.

Hope this helps.

[Matthew McMullen]

The only program I have used with success for cloning 1 drive to another was Ghost which is now owned by Symantec the version I have used is an older one but I have used it to clone windows xp pro system.

[MA-Caver]

Yes, ok but if I want to put in a new internal drive without using the original disks then will that work?
Basically what I would LIKE to do is this... I have 2 drives C and D... my D drive is bigger and I would like to transfer all that data/files/folder to a 1 tb but leave my C drive alone then at least I got storage on the larger drive but still running the OS on the smaller one ... what would be best way to do that?

[Matthew McMullen]

Well if all you are doing is transferring files from drive d to another drive there are a lot of different ways you can do that but it depends on the type of drive IDE or SATA and how many drives your computer can support. If they are IDE drives then you can have at least 4 IDE devices in your computer your CD drive would be one and drive C (master) and D (slave) would be 2 more and you should be able to connect a 4th one to the cable that the CD drive is connected to making it a slave. If you are talking about SATA drives then the number of drives you can have depends on the number of SATA ports on your computers motherboard. If they are IDE then you would just hook up the 4th drive to the CD drive cable and then just using explorer to copy all of the files from drive D to the new hard drive. You can do the same thing with SATA drives if you have a free port to connect it too. If you have programs installed on drive D you can still copy all of the files over to the new hard drive but in order for your programs to work you have to make sure you change the drive letter of the new hard drive to be drive D.