Program comparable to Ghost.

[Robert Delhommer Sr]

Are there any programs to clone a HDD. I have Ghost that I use on my old Windows XP computer and it works great to restore the HDD. But want to find something similiar for Windows 7 & 8.1. Any suggestions.

[Grant Wilkinson]

Macrium Reflect will clone a HDD. It's free,too. I used it to clone a platter HD and copy the contents to an SSD, and it worked well.

[Judson Green]

+1 on Macrium Reflect. just used it last week to clone a HD to a SSHD. no problems.

[Robert Delhommer Sr]

If my HDD becomes corrupted, can I restore it with a Macrium Reflect backup created before corruption? That is what I want to do.

[Judson Green]

not sure if this will help... but if you make a clone it will be exactly like the other HD and you can simply pull out the bad one and pop in the new cloned one. its is an exact copy, everything. and you dont need software after the clone has been made, a screwdriver is the tool of choice.

[Grant Wilkinson]

Robert: When you say "restore", do you mean that you will be replacing the corrupt hard drive, or do you simply want to "copy" the clone that you made back to the corrupt drive? I'm assuming that when you say "corrupt", you mean that the original drive itself is physically fine, but windows became corrupt. If that is the case, the problem may be that you will not be able to boot into the original drive - since windows is corrupt. It would not matter what program you used to create the clone. Your problem would be the corrupt drive not being accessible.

In this scenario, when you make the clone, you are given the option to create a rescue disk. Do that. That way, if your disk becomes corrupt, you boot with the rescue disk, and restore the clone back to the original, corrupt disk. It will overwrite everything on the disk.

That said, you can use any number of backup programs to create an image instead of a clone, including the imaging application in windows itself.

As Judson has said, if you want to clone your drive to put the clone on a new drive, which you will install to replace a corrupt drive, then Macrium will do that. Be aware, though that the clone will not be bootable. When you replace the corrupt disk with the disk containing the clone, you will need to boot from your windows disk and select "repair". It will make the cloned disk bootable.

[Alan Rutherford]

http://clonezilla.org/