5

I have two 2 TB external USB hard drives, call them HD1 and HD2. HD1 is USB 2, HD2 is USB 3. Each drive contains exactly one NTFS partition.

I want to clone HD1 to HD2, because it's newer and much, much faster.

What's the best way to do this? I don't want to do a copy-and-paste, I want to clone the whole partition. The new drive is actually a few bytes larger, so this should be possible?

I don't have a second drive that can hold the image, so it would have to clone directly to the other disk (not to a file). How can I accomplish this on Windows 7?

I know about Clonezilla but I would prefer not to have to boot from a CD or anything, as I don't have the capability to do that right now. I want to know if there's a way to do this while running Windows.

3 Answers3

1

You can use XCOPY. I made this specifically for this use. copy the following code and paste it into notepad then save it as "Backup.bat" run it and do as it asks. It is a very powerful backup and will backup everything in the drive.

@echo off
echo Enter Source Directory (Show Full File Path)
set /p sourcedir=
echo.
echo Enter Destination Directory (Show Full File Path)
set /p backupdir=
echo.
echo Enter Destination Folder Name (Name of folder that data will be saved to)
set /p destfolder=
echo.
set backupcmd=xcopy /e /h /f /y /v /c /i /r /g /k /d
%backupcmd% "%sourcedir%\*.*" "%backupdir%\%destfolder%"
attrib -s -h "%backupdir%\%destfolder%"
@timeout /t 3
JustinD
  • 704
1

O&O Disk Image (which is a paid application)

http://www.oo-software.com/en/products/oodiskimage

Simon
  • 4,481
1

Along the lines of Simon's answer, there's another pay option Acronis TrueImage that can do disk imaging (they have a free trial, I believe).

Another alternative is to run a liveboot system (like CloneZilla or GParted) inside a VM, using VirtualBox for example (VirtualBox is free). Or you could try to run a Linux distro inside Windows directly through some other means (example). In either case, there are plenty of Linux tools that will allow you to clone a drive (dd, GParted, etc).

Jeff B
  • 4,997