How to clone your hard drives

A recent forum post from ffolke at the ghacks forum asked about a free method to clone a hard drive to another one. There are actually several freeware tools out there that can do this and they distinguish each other mostly by ease of use and interface. The one tool that I would use for such a purpose is called DriveImage XML which supports SATA drivesn external hard drives and flash memory such as that of my iPod Nano.

Drive Image XML has a real nice gui which can be run in Windows. To clone a hard drive to another one click on the drive to drive entry on the lower left side of the main window. Drive Image XML scans all drives that are currently connected to your computer and displays them all in a list. Just select a drive that you do want to clone in the first step. After that you may select to use a raw mode copy which would copy all of the sectors of the drive to another one which means that even the unused sectors would be cloned to the new location.

The hot imaging strategies only apply if you clone a drive that is currently in use. Drive Image XML tries first to lock the drive and make everything read only for the time of creating the clone and if that fails use the Volume Shadow Service to create a shadow copy of the file that can’t be locked.

Once that is set you select the drive that you want to clone the files to. Again all drives connected to the computer are available to choose from.  You should make sure to select a drive that is at least slightly larger than the drive that you want to clone.

Please note that all data on the destination partition will be overwritten and deleted in the process. I would suggest to create a partition just for cloning the drive to make sure that no data is ever overwritten or deleted on the destination drive.