How do you clone a drive easily?
 

Is there a way to clone a drive in such a way as to be able to pull the original drive and put in the clone and have the computer run happily ever after easily?

I have hot swap drive bays and would like to clone my OS drive and data drives as a form of backup but I know that just copying the drive won't work.

Sorry for the ignorant question but you guys are the only ones I know who can give me a decent answer using small words and simple steps.

Thanks!

Do you have either a seagate or WD drive that will be part of the mix? If so, both companies have a free version of acronis that works great for cloning drives. The only caveat is that the software polls your hardware looking for at least one drive made by the manufacturer you dl'd it from.

I agree I just used the WD version of Acronis True Image on my new 3TB Seagate which was cloned from an older drive, worked like a charm.

i really like the MiniTool. creates a bootable cd.

MiniTool Partition Wizard Home Edition - CNET Download.com

Good old old old Norton Ghost off an old Hiren's BootCD.

Hasn't failed me yet!

I have been a big fan of ghost in the past, ghost walk all those products.... they seem to be forgotten about most of the time now. I have had issues with dynamic disks, hidden partitions on OEM systems etc with ghost not to mention slow to adopt new OSes and chip sets. It was my goto product, I loved it.... Acronis for the most part works flawlessly now.

I actually use Todo Backup. It allows you to clone your whole system to completely new hardware, regardless of the config through the WinPE environment.

EaseUS is a free solution that is easily to use.

Interesting, I am in the same boat.

What about size/partisans do size matter? Like say going from 640gb to a 120gb drive? What about lunix drives?

can't say for linux drives, but being able to go to a smaller drive is one of the improvements they've made to the free manu acronis versions.