Hello everyone. Just the other day, I bought a new hard drive since I was running out of space on the old one, and I figured that rather than sit here and install the tons of games and programs and transfer the tons of music and videos I have, I would just create an image and within a day or so, be all right.

Not so.

Seeing how Clonezilla requires the use of a LiveCD (or USB, I guess), I figured I would try DriveImage XML and saw a few videos on it. Looked easy enough. The reason I prefer(red) not to use a LiveCD is because my case is limited on space and SATA connectors, so I unplugged my CD drive to plug in my second hard drive for the transfer. I began at around 4 PM EST yesterday and it's about that time again here on the East Coast of the US. I am still wrestling with this piece of crap software. I dunno, maybe I'm just doing it incorrectly. I first decided to do a drive-to-drive copy thinking it would streamline everything. 11 hours later, I awoke to find each and every file on the second drive was corrupted. So I formatted and started again with just making a backup to the secondary drive. Four hours later, it worked successfully and I was happy. The last step I had to go through was just restoring the backup to my second drive, a feature which DriveImage supports. I began, and DIXML asked for the .xml file, which I gladly gave it. Afterward, it did something apparently unprecedented and asked for a .dat file, which I couldn't find. While I was trying to locate it, DriveImage, in its infinite wisdom, decided to format the drive on its own. So that backup was completely lost (I would've done the restore to the primary drive, but it only has 700MB of free space).

I'm basically tired of wasting two of my only three days off for a while on trying to get this stupid thing to work. I was trying to make it as 'quick' as possible because I've got this twenty minute talk/speech thing to prepare this Sunday and I work 8-10 hours daily the rest of the week. It hasn't been fun. I'm thinking of just leaving this project for my next day off sometime next week, but I'm also stubborn. I will not rest easily until I see the ability to boot into Ubuntu or XP on this thing.

But yeah, enough of my blabbing, I pretty much am asking for peoples' experience with free (so no Acronis or Ghost) cloning software. I had a look at the http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/983941-a-freeware-guide/ and the two I'm leaning towards are Paragon (which I've never really seen in action) and making a live USB for Clonezilla (which scares me 'cause everyone talks about how it's for advanced users, and while I learn easily and enjoy a challenge, I still worry). Has anyone had any experience with either of these two or DriveImage? Right now I really, really hate DriveImage.

But yeah, any answers are appreciated. Until then, I'll probably just look up reviews and videos on my own of these two and others and tentatively leave the project for another day. It would be nice if any software recommended would need little to no maintenance during backup (I don't mind a lengthy setup) since I'll be leaving it for hours at a time for sleep and work.

Thanks.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that the old drive is 320GB and the new one is 1TB, so while I know it'll take ages, something that is somewhat 'quick' (as in, not taking more than a little over a day) would be nice. Reading reviews of Paragon has told me it is quite slow (one user saying that it took 5 hours to do 48GB, and with a 320GB drive full to capacity, that'll take ages).

1. DriveImage svcks for cloning drives primary drives, plain and simple.

2. Paragon will be very slow and IIRC, you can't do direct cloning and won't resize partitions

Which leaves us with CloneZilla. Creating the live USB is dead simple with TuxBoot/UNetBootin. CloneZilla is only for "advanced users" in the sense that there is no proper GUI for it *ghasp* :rolleyes: So long as you can read, you can use it. It has a lot of advanced features, which you gotta learn to fully utilize it (compression, encryption, etc), but if you are just cloning from one drive to another, you don't need to bother

Thanks; I was hoping you'd reply. I've already used UNetBootin when I made my Ubuntu live USB, so it should be pretty straightforward. I should be able to get my head wrapped around CloneZilla. So long as I don't try to touch any features I don't actually need, I should be fine. But for now, the hard drive was placed back in its anti-static bag and put back in its box until my next day off. I really appreciate the input, though.

There's also http://www.tux.org/pub/people/kent-robotti/looplinux/rip/, which contains a bunch of handy tools, including http://www.partimage.org (I think that's the one I used a while back, don't recall any problems at all) and http://g4l.sourceforge.net/.

I use Clonezilla to make drive images. It works quite nice. I just made one last week from a clean install of Windows 7 SP1 and unfortunately had to recover from it already due to a power outage that really messed up my OS. It took about 12 minutes to re-load about 22GB from a old 5400RPM 80GB 2.5 inch drive to my 60GB SSD. It worked out fine. The only thing needed after the image was made was for me to insert the Windows install disk and it corrected the MBR. Though I booted Clonezilla from a CD, it should be no different using a USB stick.