Clone Hard Drive HELP

[nymph4]

I am going to put in a new SATA Hard Drive but I don't want to have to install everything again  and then fix every setting in every program again.

So I was going to try to Clone my master hard drive onto a Secondary hard drive and then when that is doen just put the Secondary hard drive in the Primarys place.

I now this would work but I have Win XP PRO and I did not want to buy a program just for this. Can I use win xp pro to Clone my Hard Drive??
I know win xp has  FAST Program I can use but I don't think that will clone.

Thanks

[Spoiler]

To clone a drive you will need a 3rd party tool. Windows doesn't come with a clone tool built into it.

They do have many vendors out there that can do this but you will have to buy the program. Unless someone knows of a free one I would look at Partition Manager. Its around 40.00 and works great.



http://www.partition-manager.com/?gclid=CMD71rW0q5ECFQwZgQodH1inYg

[nymph4]

Win XP has 2. programs  Backup  and File Tranfer Wizerd.

Can ether of these be used to copy my Primary hard drive to my Secondary. So I can then use my secondary as my primary.

I don't want to install everything again and when I read about these 2. programs they say you can backup a whole hard drive but I did not know if this would work?

Thanks again

[Dusty]

The hard drive manufacturer will probably have free disk setup and cloning program on its site.  Don't know about others but the programs supplied free by Seagate perform brilliantly.

Good luck.

[bartrob]

hello there

this sight will help you with your cloning and it has a couple of downloads there that will do the job for free as well
Link Edit
bartrob

[patio]

Hook up the new drive as a slave.
Use the software that ships with the new HDD as Dusty suggested.
Clone the old drive to the new drive.
Remove the old drive and hook up the new one as master.

Done.

You can then format the old drive and hook it up as a slave and use it for storage.