I recently had an opportunity to use a disk cloning application to help out a friend. He purchased Windows 7 about six months ago and since he was coming from Windows XP, a fresh install was needed. While he was going to go through that endeavor, he decided to upgrade his 160GB primary hard drive to 1TB. The install went fine and he was happily gaming until recently when his 1TB hard drive failed. I was able to pull off his valuable data from it as his backup was several months old. It was on a schedule and as he had changed jobs to working nights several months ago, the machine was not on during the time it was when this backup was configured to run. After running the manufacturer’s tools on the drive, it was determined that he could RMA it and get it replaced under warranty. Seeing the time that would take and wanting to get back to gaming, we reinstalled everything back to the trusty – albeit small – 160GB hard drive.
Last week he got a replacement drive from the manufacturer. Seeing as this was already a fresh install, I used Clonezilla to plop this instance of Windows 7 on a fresh hard drive. I found this to be an extremely easy tool that not only cloned his data from the 160GB drive to the 1TB drive, it set all the pieces needed so that the 1TB drive would boot once this process was complete. I would recommend using this software again in the future if you have a need to upgrade a hard drive.
Because of his experience with the drive failure and the inexpensiveness of drives these days, my friend bought a second drive and we used dynamic disks within Windows 7 to create a software RAID1 solution. His motherboard does not support RAID1 otherwise I would have chosen using a hardware-based RAID solution. He is back to gaming away on redundant 1TB drives and I’ve changed his backup to happen as the machine is on instead of a specified time when the computer may or may not be running.