I figure the people who are into building pcs would also have great knowlege of hard drive duplications.
Our defense is making a duplicate of all those little marks on the hard drives. Take marc one 0 on sector what ever and track whatever and put that on the other drive sector 0 track 0 or wherever it starts and make a duplicate of this haystack when its working that way when its not I dont have to spend a lot of time fussing with it. You all on this "PC Custom Builds and Overclocking" I beg you for wisdom about making hard drive clones, making images of a partition, making an image of hard drives.
What is a NT signature ? How do I see and know if the boot sector has what the bios or UEFI is after. ( hex editors )
Is there a Computer that works really well for making clones of drives. I want to set one of them up for doing just clones - Or would it be better to by a disk duplicator … ?
Any tricks that make hard drive duplications successful. Any useful bits of information about hdd ssd duplications. Should I begin to learn linux ? And when in the server environment what applications do they use for this. Mirror Raid ?
Thus far I am exploring software packages both free and paid. But I am seeing that Windows 7 -10 have built in commands for this. It looks like I need to work with powershell more as well.
Its all about the BIOS and the UEFI when it comes to booting? Its the program that says no I wont boot or yes I will boot. Or maybe windows has some conditions that must be met as well. I need to find out what the conditions must be for a drive to boot in order to diagnose why a drive wont boot.
One thing that totally baffels me is why I need to wipe my ssd clean before I do a clone otherwise it will not boot. This baffels me because I thought when I cloned a drive it wiped EVERY thing off.
Also the people who write these programs to do hard drive imaging, are these glorified batch files with a user interface. If so would there be a way to view the commands that is makes ? Do hard drives have a program embedded in there chips that can be looked at in any way. ?
Ok I see there are blog just for this subject alone. But still you all might have some tips for me. THank you
No need to build an extra pc for it. Just take whatever machine you have (laptop, old pc...), install a decent backup/ cloning software like Paragon Hard Disk Manager (Pro), Acronis True Image, Macrium Reflect... Any computer that is not older than 5 - 6 years can easily clone HDD's as background task. A laptop would be ideal since those usually need less power than desktop PC's. Plus they are portable so you can take them wherever you need.
I had zero problems cloning my old drive to my SSD and new bigger drive. I used Macrium Reflect, so simple to use and effective as well.
I have use simple way of use the partition wizard cloning my hard drive in windows.
I have used Macrium Reflect to do this and it works very well
Macrium Reflect Free
100% agree - Macrium Reflect is a jewel in the crown.I have used Macrium Reflect to do this and it works very well
Macrium Reflect Free
Thanks all for all the info ! I now am wondering what applications are looking for when they have found themselves on a different drive that they have been cloned to.. Like an ssd upgrade. Would the applications know that they have been cloned to a same size brand drive ? Or are they looking at some number on a chip in the hard drive. ? It would be nice to know I had a working known good clone of all my os and its painstaking setup. An image of a drive only proves good when it actually restores. I have used Macrium and really liked it. I see it is really free for home use so I am going to download the newest version and install it. I looked at their business pricing and wow. I think it might be worth it if I was supporting an attorney office or such.
