Hello, Im a bit worried about my old HD, its from 2003 and Id rather not have to reinstall everything so I want to ghost it onto a new HD.

Im loathe to pay for such software when I have been told there is capable software out there thats free. Does anybody have any recommendations?

nothing out there thats free in sense of freeware

Theres plenty out there in the sense of torrentware ripoffcompanyxyzware & piratedversionware

Nothing at all decent as freeware?

Gimme your suggestions for normal stuff then if you dont mind.

Try looking through the stuff on http://www.download.com to see if there is anything there you fancy. As you arent going to use it a lot then you should be looking at shareware too. Hard disk manufacturers used to occasionally provide a version of ghost free, so worth checking.

Personally use Acronis Trueimage, but you have to pay for that.

Use software raid within Windows to mirror your HD.

acronis trial

er... or boot linux live cd. Attach some decent sized storage (has to equal your old harddrive partitions size, or be bigger)... and use DD

then use DD again to image the drive back.

Free... and a piece ofpee.

search for Hirens boot cd thinking of it....

Quote from: Markacronis trial

as said.  Acronis is the way to go.  If you do decide to buy it then the costs isnt that high either, you just have to buy if from the US website and spend $50 rather than Uk website and spend £50

Quote from: Eggtasticosearch for Hirens boot cd thinking of it....

Yes I would go with Hirens, Im positive it has some HDD clone tool on.

It does, at least the copy I had did, but some copies may have viruses stuck on them, worth scanning *before* you burn one to disk.

I have Hirens 9.3 and the scan tells me:

QuoteJ:\BootCD\WinTools\VDefs.exe - probably unknown NewHeur_PE virus [7]

so it is the only thing on 9.3 to watch out for

But after searching some more about VDefs.exe:

Quote#

VDefs.exe might show up as a false positive virus since it contains virus signatures to use during a virus scan. You could always submit the file to http://virusscan.jotti.org/ and see how many scanners detect something. It could even be the exe packer they used.

Hiren 9.1 Rules..
# Q Says:
June 18th, 2007 at 8:56

VDEFS.exe looks like a virus definitions update which would contain virus signatures that some antivirus software might detect as a virus and generate a false positive.
# Sergey Says:
June 19th, 2007 at 21:36

Thanks. But I'll avoid to use this application. Just in case))
By the way - the rest is great!