I Bought A Seagate 320 G Hardrive - IWANT TO MAKE IT MY MAIN DRIVE

I HEARD I CAN CLONE IT BUT I DNT KNOW HOW TO CLONE HARD DRIVES JUST PLANTS WELL HOW DO I GET THIS DONE?

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There are two ways of cloning a hard disk : hardware cloning and software cloning.
1) If you just bought a disk drive in a shop and did not open the box yet, cloning is simple : you go back to the same shop, you give the same amount of money and you get a second disk drive which is exactly the same as the first one.
2) If you already installed Microsoft Windows on your hard drive, it's a good idea to clone your c: drive, which is physically a partition on your hard disk. This is a software partition cloning to a file. Ideally, if you have several disks, the file cloning your c: partition is on a separate drive, so in case of hardware failure you loose the original partition and you still have the clone.
If you have a single hard drive, the best thing is, during the Windows installation, to put the operating system on a small part of your hard drive (typically use 40 giga for Windows, and the rest of the disk for your data). Then, your Windows disk will traditionnally be named "c:", and your data will be on a different partition, probably named "D:"
In this case, "cloning" means make a compressed image of your "c:" partition somewhere on your "D:" disk. So, if you experience a Windows crash, or a virus, or a stupid driver install error, or a worm opening 256 ads windows on your system, simply restore your "c:" disk from the clone image, and your system will be back to it's initial stable state. Another nice example is the fact that a freshly installed Microsoft Windows boots in about 30 seconds, and after some weeks or some monthes you see it needing several minutes to half an hour for booting ; then you restore your disk from it's clone and it boots in 30 seconds again.
Of course you need a software for doing that, the most popular ones are Norton Ghost and Acronis. They perform in a very short period of time a complete backup of your c: disk on a file of another disk or another partition, or on a network remote disk, and restore the crashed disk from the backup in case of disaster.
And of course the best softwares are also the most expensive ones.
Personnally I use a free version name CloneZilla, very efficient end very fast. You boot on a liveCD and you backup the system disk to a data disk, and in case of problem you boot again on the liveCD and you restore the system partition from the clone.
Hope this helped
Yordan

 

 

 

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