Copying/cloning hard drive

[Starrx05]

Just wondering if it's possible to completely copy a 100GB laptop hard drive to a smaller one (so I don't have to reinstall everything)? I have one slow laptop w/ a 100GB but only use like 20GB on it. I'd like to copy data into a smaller drive like 80GB so I can save the 100GB for a faster laptop. I already have an ext enclosure to put the 80GB in and the drives are of same type. Please let me know what software can let you do this. I remember Ghost can let you duplicate only if target drive is of equal or bigger size.

 

[AmberClad]

Yep, I just did this prior to migrating over to Vista. I cloned a 160GB drive onto a 75GB one (I booted the resulting cloned disk just to make sure it was working properly).

I used Seagate DiscWizard, but that requires at least one of the drives be a Seagate brand one. Seagate offers a similar app, MaxBlast, for Maxtor brand drives. Both are now free downloads, I believe. If neither of your drives is a Seagate or Maxtor, there's TrueImage (which DiscWizard and MaxBlast are based on), but it's not free.

Edit: Both of the Seagate programs are available on their website:
Seagate DiscWizard
Maxtor MaxBlast

 

[Starrx05]

Thanks for your quick reply. I believe I can find TrueImage which is made by Acronis? I heard of that before. So did you have to install the app and run it inside Windows or you can boot from CD and do it there? And if you have to resize partition, what software you use besides the old famous PartitionMagic?

 

[AmberClad]

It was surprisingly simple to use. You run it from inside Windows, telling it which source disk to use, and which disk to clone that to. After that, it will reboot the system, and proceed to do the copy. The copying progress screen looks pretty much like that blue background/white font console that PartitionMagic uses (it doesn't do the actual copying while inside Windows).

I think I saw some options as far as specifying and creating partitions, but you're not required to mess around with it much. I just opted to use the entire disk as one partition.

Oh, and yes, Acronis makes TrueImage.