HD Clone Program

[Allochthonous]

I have a noisy 40 GB HD that I would like to use as a source for a fresh XP installations (kinda like a rescue partition).  I want to be able to slave it to another, most likely smaller, HDD and copy the installation over for quicker recovery than a fresh install that requires updates, etc.  I may even want to include several variations of the install.
 
I have tried a program called HDClone (from the UBCD) and really like its interface, however, the free version only does straight small to large size HDD clones.  I need to be able to copy from partition to partition, or partition to HD I suppose. Being the cheapskate than I am, are there any FREE programs out there as nice as HDClone that will do what I want to do?
 
PK
 

[patio]

Yes.
Every HDD manuf. has one...select the 40G manuf. and DLoad their utilities.
Hook it up as a slave drive and boot with the utility floppy/CD you created and select clone...
It will then clone your existing install onto the 40G.
I would also run the HDD diagnostics on that 40G as well to make sure you can trust it with data.

[Allochthonous]

Hmmm...really?  The HD manu is WD.  It will even do partition to partition or will allow me to clone a partition from a 40 GB to a 13.6 GB?


pk

[patio]

You didn't mention partitions...this complicates things slightly so post back with exactly what you want to do describing each drive/partition and i'll walk you through it...
And yes it can be done as long as the partition you are cloning to is larger than the partition you are cloning...
You also have to take into account that if you want this drive to be bootable then the clone has to go to the first partition of the source drive which needs to be set as active...
Let us know.

BTW WD's tools are one of the better ones out there.
Datalife i believe their called...

[Allochthonous]

I want to be able to slave it to another, most likely smaller, HDD and copy the installation over for quicker recovery than a fresh install that requires updates, etc.  I may even want to include several variations of the install...

I need to be able to copy from partition to partition, or partition to HD I suppose. 

I want to break up the 40 GB drive into several 7-10 GB partitions, just large enough for fully updated Windows, AV software, and maybe a couple other apps. Then I want to be able to clone this partiton over to another HD (that may be smaller, say 20 GB or 13.6 GB.)  That way, I can mess around with this PC and if something goes awry, I can easily restore it by simply cloning again from the 40 GB drive.  I thought I could even create several variations in the other source drive partitions, but I am not sure if this is possible.

I would love to be able to leave everthing as one partition, and not have to break the destination drive up, but in my experiments, this was necessary.  It would even be OK if i could leave the 40 GB as one partition with just one installation, but i still need to be able to clone it to a smaller drive, hence the creation of a smaller partition, as my experiments would not allow me to clone a large drive to a small drive.

Does this make sense?

PK