Is there a free alternative to Ghost?

[SunnyD]

I have a pair of 200gig SATA drives coming in for RAID purposes which is going to be replacing my trusty 40gig drive. My whole intent is to move the "world" to the RAID drives and retire that little D740X. Only problem I have is that it will require a reinstall of everything including Windows. Now I don't have a problem taking the time to reinstall everything, however, it's all the patches and updates that will kill me. I'm on dialup for now at home and I'm not to fond of having to run Windows Update among other things again.

Other than dd, which isn't an option since the drives and the partition tables aren't going to be the same, is there anything like Norton Ghost that I could use and obtain for FREE - meaning freeware not warez.

 

[BlueWeasel]

Not that I know of.

 

[GtPrOjEcTX]

there's a 15 day trial of Acronis True Image 7.0 available.

 

[SunnyD]

Originally posted by: GtPrOjEcTX
there's a 15 day trial of Acronis True Image 7.0 available.

Crippleware at all? Or will I be able to dupe without issues?

 

[NetMavrik]

I have been using a program from TeraByte Unlimited called BootIt Next Generation. Here is the link:
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootitng.html

Check it out and post your comments on it.

 

[GtPrOjEcTX]

Originally posted by: SunnyD

Originally posted by: GtPrOjEcTX
there's a 15 day trial of Acronis True Image 7.0 available.

Crippleware at all? Or will I be able to dupe without issues?

I've used it a few times. Full featured, it just stops letting you make the disk images/ disk copies after 15 days.

awesome program.

 

[SunnyD]

Originally posted by: GtPrOjEcTX

Originally posted by: SunnyD

Originally posted by: GtPrOjEcTX
there's a 15 day trial of Acronis True Image 7.0 available.

Crippleware at all? Or will I be able to dupe without issues?

I've used it a few times. Full featured, it just stops letting you make the disk images/ disk copies after 15 days.

awesome program.

v8.0 trial version says it won't restore system partitions.

 

[GtPrOjEcTX]

version 8.0 trial? I didn't even know there was a version 8.0

goes to investigate.


that being said, I've use this to swap hard drives (my main system drive) a few times. I can vouch for version 7.0.

edit:

Trial-version limitations:

15 days trial version;
It is not possible to restore images of a system partition;
It is not possible to create and restore images, and clone disks when Acronis True Image 8.0 is launched from the bootable rescue media.

that's a load of crap. try to find the version 7.0 trial. if I remember I'll upload it for you when I get home.

 

[Wex]

Has anyone used some ghosting software and knows it works and is reliable? It doesn't have to be freeware, i just want something to exactly duplicate a drive i have. As in copy over everything...settings,data,progs,apps etc etc... The 120gig seagate drive i have right now is a little messed up..(mabe happened during the shipping processs..) As in saved word doc's appear corrupted, i cant go to standby mode, and a desktop theme that used to work, and stay the same theme whenever i boot up, gets changed to classic windows style with the same colors and all so i have to manually change it back everytime. My drive was working fine before... so its odd...

 

[Arcanedeath]

Just buy a copy of Ghost 2003 or later, it's worth the money, it's by far the best software for copying drives period...... and it has so many options and modes you just can't go wrong.

 

[GtPrOjEcTX]

Originally posted by: Arcanedeath
Just buy a copy of Ghost 2003 or later, it's worth the money, it's by far the best software for copying drives period...... and it has so many options and modes you just can't go wrong.

have you used Acronis TrueImage?

 

[Wex]

My computer has also been crashing alot lately. And when i boot it back up windows reports some files are missing/corrupted.

 

[starwarsdad]

The newest version of Ghost (9) is sweet! It allows imaging to IEEE1394 over PCMCIA cards and runs from within Windows. Definitely worth the money.

On another note, I got a free OEM copy of Ghost 2002 with my motherboard. If you built your own system, check out your CD collection......

 

[sciencewhiz]

knoppix (or another bootable linux distribution) will let you do just about anything ghost will. You just need a combination of tools: dd, cdrecord, mkisofs, isolinux, qtparted, etc.

dd will work, just take an image of each partition seperatly, rather then of the whole drive.