[brpn]

i bought a new SATA 320GB drive and I want to clone my vista partition onto the new HDD. I tried snapshot but it gave me errors.. so I wonder what is the best/safest way to clone a vista partition? Is there any free software that will do this? My current vista partition is on a IDE drive which I want to remove and use as a external backup drive and only use SATA drives in my computer.

any help greatly appreciated.

[myfavoritemartin]

I'm fairly sure you can do this with Acronis. http://www.regnow.com/softsell/nph-s...ffiliate=78174. It's not free, but there is a 30 day free trial version: http://www.regnow.com/trialware/down...ffiliate=78174

[JohnWill]

I use Acronis True Image, and I successfully cloned my system on a SATA drive on my HP laptop.

[DaveBurnett]

I use Ghost as I have to copy unallocated space as well.

[JohnWill]

I've never had that need, but I figured that the clone operation of TI would do a true image. OTOH, I don't know that to be a fact.

[Rich-M]

With Acronis TI under "Manage Disks" use "Clone Disk" and it will copy the entire drive from one drive to another.

[DaveBurnett]

It does not copy unallocated space unfortunately - and I have partitions that look that way.

[brpn]

i will have to try acronis. we use that at work. i had a problem when i tried to clone vista partition and when i went to write the image to the new drive.. it was having a heart attack because the partition wasnt 'exactly' the same size.. etc.. on snapshots page they say you have to make the partitions the exact same which i dont want to do because i only want vista to have 25gb partition.. i move my user data to another drive..etc.. so nothing gets saved there at all.. is there a way to resize the partition in vista? also i appreciate your suggestions.. i did the clone but it gave me a winload.exe error.. i read already some posts on here about how to solve that but their suggestions only work with ide drives.. i had to pull out my vista install disk and it actually saw there was a problem when it searched the drive for windows directory.. it fixed that error.. however.. once i got into vista.. i was working on something and had to goto device manager.. i saw it said i had 14 more days before activation.. wtf.. why would i have to re-input my prod id? it worked but why ask that?