Best (cheap) software to move OS drive?

[SoulAssassin]

Looking to move my OS from the current drive to a net new drive and wondering what the best app is? Used to do PC stuff back in the day but really don't have the free time anymore so I'm out of the loop? Back in the day I would have used Ghost...how about Acronis? Anything free? This is a one time migration and I'd rather not pay for something if possible. New drive is larger than the old one so I'd like to be able to expand the partition when it's moved.

 

[VirtualLarry]

WD and Seagate have their own-branded version of Acronis, that you can download and install free. It detects if you have one of their brand HD in your system, and as long as you do, you are good to go.

I think Intel offers an OS drive cloning tool too, if you use one of their SSDs.

 

[lxskllr]

Clonezilla for a brand agnostic choice.

 

[bruceb]

What was mentioned above all will do the job. And you may want to consider a purchase of Acronis TruImage ... it is not very costly, works well and you can use it to make a Backup Image for later use in the event of a crashed drive or virus. Well worth the small fee.

 

[SoulAssassin]

cool thanks guy, will any of those move to a dissimilar partition size or am I looking at using partition magic?

 

[Emulex]

acronis easy migrate is free for 30 day trial. it is the same program that the other drive makers provide. 30 day trial - if you can't clone it in 30 days you are !@#!.

yes the program will do a file by file copy and resize for windows partitions. it's really sketchy about filesystem corruption and bad sectors though. needs to be a clean copy source.

 

[Markbnj]

What are you running? Windows 7 has built-in drive imaging. Works great.

 

[Diogenes2]

Agree on Win7 image back-up,

IF no Win7 then Macrium Reflect Free Edition works well ..

 

[JimKiler]

cool thanks guy, will any of those move to a dissimilar partition size or am I looking at using partition magic?

The free WD version of Acronis let me go from a 60GB to 74GB drive.

 

[SoulAssassin]

Ran the free version of Acronis Easy Migrate. It's actually a 15 day trial but 15 minutes might have been enough. Ridiculously easy to use and it automagically resized the partition. Good stuff.

 

[goobernoodles]

DriveImage XML is a free imaging/cloning option. I've tried it numerous times without any problems.

It's available here:

http://www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm

 

[wayliff]

Clonezilla for a brand agnostic choice.

+1 - it works awesome.