I was browsing thought the internet and i come across this site which say that you could clone a hard drive so i was wondering it is really possible ??
Well, you can connect two hard drives to a computer and copy and paste everything. Does that count? :
I'am not sure i'll just paste the article because i just clear my history so i dont have it website but i did save the article How to Clone a Hard Drive Did know that you could clone your current Hard Drive without having to by extra software? Maybe you didn't know that all that you needed, was already set up on your current system? Well, it is... and if you follow this tut, you shouldn't have much of a problem. Make sure that you have a Master and a Slave setup on your system. The Slave drive, in this case, is where all the data on the Master is going to go to. First: Perform a Scandisk your Master drive and follow that with a thorough Defrag. If you have an Antivirus program, do a thorough sweep with the AV first, then do the Scandisk, followed by the Defrag. Second: Do the same thing to the target drive, as you did the Master: Scandisk then a thorough Defrag. Third: Right-click on the Target drive and click on Format. When the box comes up, click your mouse onto the "Full" button. Fourth: After Formatting the Target drive, run a Scandisk again and click on the button that says "Autofix Errors". Fifth: In this final part, you might want to cut-and-paste to code in, unless you are sure that you can do it without making any mistakes: Click on the "Start" button, then click on the "Run..." button, then place the following into the Runbox: "XCOPY C:\*.*D:\ /c/h/e/k/r" (minus the quotes, of course) then press the "Enter" button. If you receive an error message, then remove the space from between XCOPY and C:\ Anything that should happen to come up in the DOS box, just click "Y" for "Yes". When its all finished, pull the original Master from the system, designate the Slave as the Master (change your jumpers), then check your new Master out. This tut has worked and has been tested on all systems except for Windows 2000, so you really shouldn't have any problems. If, by any chance, you should come across a snag, message me and I'll walk you through it.
yes, cloning a hard drive is possible, but xcopy does not constitute cloning. Xcopy is essentially the automated equivalent of copy and pasting the contents. Cloning involves special software to produce a sector-by-sector 'image' of the drive, much like you create an image of a CD. You can then 'image' other drives with the image. That is what computer manufacturers do; they don't install windows on every computer, its far quicker to image them. Examples of disk cloning software: Norton Ghost, Paragon DriveCopy, Acronis TrueImage. PS: that would not work, it would assume that the program you are trying to run is 'xcopyc:\' and would say 'Windows cannot find xcopyC:\ ...'
quote: "XCOPY C:\*.*D:\ /c/h/e/k/r" (minus the quotes, of course) then press the "Enter" button. If you receive an error message, then remove the space from between XCOPY and C:\ Yes. this will only copy everything from one drive to another and that's it. this is not a clone. xcopy is the original (other than copy) copy and paste command of Dos. what you see here just mean xcopy (perform copy) from C:\*.* (*.* mean everything) to D:\ /c (ignore error) /h (copy also hidden and system file) /e (copy directory and sub directory even empty one) /k (copy attributes of files) /r (overwrite read only file) and Loonylion is right. removing the space between xcopy and c:\ will only resume in a bad command or syntax error.
