Hard Drive Imaging software?

[rsbriggs]

I'm looking for some software that can upgrade a Hard drive image and I'm wondering if anyone out there has recommendations.

Here's the problem I need to solve. I have a couple of crunchers that have licensed copies of Windows on small hard-drives (4 to 9 GB). In order to sell these, I need to upgrade them to more like 80GB drives. I need to transfer the current drive image from the smaller drive to the larger, so I can just swap in the larger drive and reboot...

I can't just re-install Windows on the new drives, at least one of them has a custom driver that's installed but isn't easily replaceable, so a reinstall isn't feasible. ( And my experience in the past has been that attempting to re-install and re-register the Windows operating system, different drive but same computer, results in a message along the lines of "This copy of windows has already been installed on a computer" )

Does anyone out there have experience with upgrading hard drives like this and software used to do it?

[Shish]

Yes it`s easy.
If you got a single Maxtor, their free software allows you to do a drive image to any other drive and most of the other companies have similar.

Personally I use Acronis which allows you to resize either way and apart from some problems with fancy raid5 setups it`s a very good prog.

PM me if you like and I`ll help you out ;)

[MerePeer]

As you may know the linux "dd" command is very powerful since it is a raw input -> raw output bit copier. I recently cloned a linux drive using dd. I think I have read in "Knoppix Hacks" in the bookstore that this same approach could be used for Windows drives, including upgrading size, by booting from Knoppix and then accessing the source and target drives using dd. I also think it said this would just leave unpartioned space when it is done if the target was larger. The unpartitioned space you could then use Windows to map a new D: partition, or you could boot from a CD tool like http://www.sysresccd.org/ and expand the (ntfs or dos) partition.

I have an 80GB which I'm planning to replace a 20GB win2k with and I was going to try this approach for the same reasons you mention plus it seems this might save time vs. O/S reinstall approach. Just need to find the time...and I need to break down and by Knoppix Hacks too.

[Scoofy12]

There's always Norton/Symantec ghost, and a GPL program called mondo with similar functionality.

[QIbHom]

I highly recommend Knoppix Hacks, especially for those who either run Windows or have to fix their relatives' trojan infested Windows computers. It is amazing what you can do with free, legal tools.

For those in the US, I think bookpool.com had the cheapest copies the last time I checked.

dd is a very handy command to get to know. I used ddrescue (which is just a simple script with arcane dd commands) to get back most of the data on a hard drive that had died.