By Merle Nicholson, Tampa PC Users Group
merle@merlenicholson.com

Nah .. no big deal, it’s just a disk drive. The message of this article is that if you want to clone a disk drive you need to go out and spend Zero dollars; that’s $0.00 on disk image software. Don’t let the salesman convince you that you need to buy Disk Image or Ghost if all you want to do is go to a larger (or smaller) drive. The software’s free, and you might already have it.

My Project: I’m running out of room on my server drive where I do backups, so I want to replace the 20G with a 60G from my personal system. So I bought an 80G Serial ATA drive for my personal system because it’s faster than the 60G Ultra 133. And I’m doing two clones: 60 to 80 on my personal system, and 20 to 60 on my server, and I’ll have a 20 left over for another computer I’m building. I got an excellent retail price on the 80G SATA.

The Software: I do have Drive Image v8.0, but I elected to ignore that and use a utility from Western Digital. It’s free for the download. It’s called “Western Digital Data Lifeguard V11.0 for DOS”. There is a companion “DLG Diagnostic for DOS” for repairing or diagnosing problems on a Western Digital Drive. Both Seagate and Maxtor have similar offerings. I’ve used both, and I recall that the Maxtor (probably) uses the same program as Western Digital; they’re both made by Kroll Ontrack. It’s been some time since I used the Seagate, so I don’t recall much about it except that I’m confident that it’s functionally the same.

So, if you buy a retail hard drive and need to clone the data from an old drive, look at the CD that comes with it. If you have an OEM drive (no box, even!), all you need to do is download from the manufacturer’s website. Maxtor, Seagate and Western Digital all have them, and they’re free! You’ll see that they all have hard drive diagnostics and repair utilities – all of which I’ve successfully used. Some have image backup software. u