Cloning hard drive

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Steggy
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Re: Cloning hard drive

Post by Steggy »

SteveHGraham wrote:I bought two SSD drives, and they cloned without issue. You really want this kind of drive if you can afford it. You will be amazed to learn how much of your computer's time was wasted by the conventional hard drive.
You are being fooled if you think the performance of your disk is a big factor on a Windows system.

BTW, SSDs ("SSD drive" is redundant) have reliability issues related to how frequently they are required to carry out write operations. I would not use one in any system in which real time data is constantly changing. Mechanical drives, when properly installed and cooled, continue to be more trustworthy than SSDs, as well as offering much greater capacity per dollar.
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Steggy
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Re: Cloning hard drive

Post by Steggy »

ctwo wrote:CloneZilla is usually downloaded as an iso file, an image file to be burned to disc.
Clonezilla, which we use all the time to replicate disks, can be installed to and booted from a USB memory stick that can support the building of a filesystem (I have an old Kingston DataTraveler 500MB stick I use for the purpose). Clonezilla, it should be noted, is built on top of Linux, not Windows, generally making it filesystem-agnostic. That said, it fully understands the mechanics of the Windows NT filesystem, as well as FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, and some others.
The new drive should be set up with the needed partitions before booting CloneZilla. The partitions need to be the same size as the source drive if cloning as there are some other options.
Not necessarily. The target disk can be larger than the source disk and the partition(s) that are generated on the target disk can be expanded to utilize all available raw space. A copy under Clonezilla is really a raw dump from a source disk to the target, and at its most basic level, cares not about the partitioning of the source disk, other than what is in the partition table at physical sector zero of the disk. Options allow you to copy the MBR if desired, or skip it and generate a new one on the target disk if you suspect the MBR on the source disk is tainted.
Microsoft does not give you tools to do this.
All the more reason to stay away from their junky software. :D Real computers run UNIX or Linux. :lol:
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ctwo
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Re: Cloning hard drive

Post by ctwo »

I think SSD's add a great deal of performance to a Windows system, but they have to be set up properly. I tried to clone my Win7 system running a 120 GB SSD to an identically sized hard disc drive. It was a decent drive that came out of a laptop. Anyway, the cloned OS took more than twice as long to boot and you know when your PC has a virus or something else is pulling all the resources? Yeah, that's what it seemed like trying to run it with the old tech. I ran out and bought a new SSD and recloned, speed came back.

It does depend on what you are doing. Usually hard drive speed is not the biggest bottleneck, but it does impact certain operations quite a bit.

I'm not an expert on CloneZilla, but it was easy enough for me to figure out. I thought the partitions had to be setup if you are cloning a drive with multiple partitions, at least I do not recall it being able to create all of the partitions from the source disc as a single operation. The target partition needed to exist.
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BadDog
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Re: Cloning hard drive

Post by BadDog »

In my experience, you are mistaken on both points (as long as you run W7 or later). I run my computer rather hard all day every day. Right now, I have 5 VMs running, including this one which is pretty calm being just my "web access only" VM, but the others churn quite heavily. My current box has 3 SSDs running 24/7 now for years. 2 have been running for about 4 years, the largest for about 2 years, and I just took one of my old left overs that was still running and installed it in a friend's laptop. All told I've had around 8 SSDs since the time when 128GB SSDs cost almost as much as a laptop. The first few were OCZ and the last half dozen or so have been Samsung 840-850 and such. All that and I have yet to have a single failure of an SSD. Once they got the TRIM (W7 or later) sorted, and you allow it to over-provision, it's all been smooth sailing for me.

I would also disagree on your assessment of performance. Most decent CPUs are plenty for anything other than gaming systems. If you have too little memory, then that's probably the single best improvement you can make. At least 2GB with W7 x86, etc. But with enough memory, a physical hard drive is the next big killer. Particularly in laptops that usually run low RPM drives for battery optimization reasons. But the same is true in desktop systems. And I know, I've built (and rebuilt) dozens of relatively cutting edge machines over the last 10 years, so I've seen the real world impact of SSDs.

But I agree wholeheartedly about being far cheaper per GB to use rotary drives. And if you are dealing with servers the longevity vs use may be important, different goals. But my system easily gets beat harder than 99.99% of user systems out there, and I wouldn't run it any other way. That said, any system can fail for many reasons, so good backups of critical data is always important.

See, this is why I didn't want to post. I can't help myself! LOL!
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BadDog
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Re: Cloning hard drive

Post by BadDog »

ctwo wrote:It does depend on what you are doing. Usually hard drive speed is not the biggest bottleneck, but it does impact certain operations quite a bit.
I would also agree with that statement. If you are accessing a web page, SSD doesn't make any noticeable difference. But booting and shutting down, or more importantly, starting a new large program. My dev environment as configured can take well over a minute to load from rotary drive, less than 10 seconds on SSD, and I often have get 2 or 3 up and running at the same time. And I frequently need to fire up and shut down virtual machines. Those waiting for the thing I said to do to get done are the things that drive me up a wall, and affect my ability to get done, and why an SSD is so important to my lively hood.
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SteveM
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Re: Cloning hard drive

Post by SteveM »

So, if I use the original as the primary and the new one as the seconday, how do I move all the files off the C and onto D? The files are all in the user folders and the shared documents, pictures, music and video folders. Those are all system folders. If I just move them to new folders on D, then I lose the functions provided by the system folders.

If it were my machine, I would just move my files to the secondary drive (I have on my own machine), however, this is a shared machine and I don't want the kids to have access to my files, but everyone should have access to the shared folders.

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SteveHGraham
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Re: Cloning hard drive

Post by SteveHGraham »

BigDumbDinosaur wrote: You are being fooled if you think the performance of your disk is a big factor on a Windows system.
You must be joking. The difference is tremendous. No doubt about it. Not subtle. Not my imagination.

It's wonderful to see a PC boot in seconds instead of minutes, or to see large applications load quickly.
Every hard-fried egg began life sunny-side up.
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SteveHGraham
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Re: Cloning hard drive

Post by SteveHGraham »

As for reliability, you put your apps on an SSD and your important data on a disk. Anyone who doesn't back up probably isn't smart enough to install an SSD anyway.
Every hard-fried egg began life sunny-side up.
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ctwo
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Re: Cloning hard drive

Post by ctwo »

Those are not system folders, they are personal folders. System files are mostly in the Windows directory and sprinkled around. But what function do you expect to loose? Unfortunately, Windows applications typically default to save and open your personal files from the C user's space, but that is a simple workaround.

You do not have to move the old files, but it is nice to have a single place for all pictures, for example. On my computer, I have created a folder called "D:\Camera" and that is where I dump all pictures from my cameras, and I edit those and save the edited copy in a new folder of some relevant name, still under the Camera folder. I have a folder for D:\Machining and another D:\Machining\CNC and another folder D:\School and D:\Work, etc... The D drive is the "My Documents" hard drive, and all my personal files go there and that drive moves to any PC without any more effort that plugging in a drive.

To copy files, you can select the entire folder and copy/paste to the new drive. You can even copy the folder C:\Users\(your user name) to get most all of your personal files. There will be system files in there that cannot be copied, but you can skip all those. OF course that will bring Windows clutter to your new drive, so it's nicer to copy just your own folders and files as you like. You can use Ctrl-click to select several folders, then use Ctrl-C to copy and then Ctrl-V to paste on the new drive. If you open a folder and want to select all files, use Ctrl-A.

Furthermore, I use batch scripts to make backup copies of the "My Documents" HDD so I can mirror all of the updated files (and only new/updated files to save time) and also copy files from certain locations on my C Drive to the D drive (for those things that Windows still places on C). The script looks like this:

xcopy D:\*.* G:\ /i /d /s /e /y /c /j

or I could just backup one folder:

xcopy D:\Machining\*.* G:\Machining\ /i /d /s /e /y /c /j

The switches mean:
/i destination is a directory
/d Date in MM-DD-YYYY format, to copy files changed on or after that date, or blank to copy newer files
/s copy all sub-directories
/e also create empty folders if they exist in source
/y suppress prompting (are you sure you want to copy this?)
/c continue on errors
/j no buffering, helps with bigger files.

Just save that line of text, edit to your needs, and save the text file as whatever.bat. Double click the file to run the script.

You can have several lines too, so you can specify the individual directories and skip ones you don't want to copy (like a temp directory)

Do you want a list of every folder and file on your HDD or in a folder? Save this as a batch file, run it and it will product a text file with this listing:

dir /a-d /-p /q /b /on >filelisting.txt

That will produce a list of files/folders from the directory it is launched. Save it in the root of C, and it will give all in C, save it in My Pictures, then it will just list everything in My Pictures. Or you could change the command to dir D:\

/a-d display selected attributes, this shows sub-directories
/-p no pause
/q display file owner (system saves user name with file)
/b bare format no header
/on order files by name
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To measure is to know - Lord Kelvin
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warmstrong1955
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Re: Cloning hard drive

Post by warmstrong1955 »

Some of us are not so fluent in Nerd CTWO....so we rely on teenagers.

Mine kids are older now, but still quite fluent in Nerd. One is an IT guy, the other does computer graphics for a gaming company.
"Come fix my computer".

;)
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SteveHGraham
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Re: Cloning hard drive

Post by SteveHGraham »

One of the new thresholds of aging is the day your dad gets too old to use the computer and stops asking you to help.
Every hard-fried egg began life sunny-side up.
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warmstrong1955
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Re: Cloning hard drive

Post by warmstrong1955 »

SteveHGraham wrote:One of the new thresholds of aging is the day your dad gets too old to use the computer and stops asking you to help.
Not sure what that age is. Me and a friend, who is 94, email back & forth several times a week. Still sharp as a tack.
Guess it's a matter of how old you feel?

;)
Bill
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