Can anyone recommend a HDD cloning tool for my purpose?

[Djard007]

I have Vista Home Premium on a HP laptop and would like to perform a HDD image backup, like I do on my Desktop PC, running Win 7, which lets me save disk images on an external USB HDD that is 320 GB (matching 512 bytes/sector).

Western Digital offers a bare-bones edition of Acronis, which I tried: I used it to create a 100 GB partition with 512 bytes/sector, since my external USB drive is 5TB with advanced format (4096 bytes/sector). But Acronis wants to format the whole USB drive, where I save personal files. In other words, Acronis wants the whole 5TB.

I may need to use the 320 GB drive that I have for the laptop also, since the formatting matches. But the Vista Home Premium does not have the feature to create a Windows System Image file, like in Win 7. I'm hoping a software solution exits. Any program out there that works like the one in Win 7, where the disk image file can be saved on an ext USB without deleting other content on the drive?

 

[sketchpad]

I've used Paragon Hard Disk Manager to clone drives before and found it to be very good. Worth a look.

 

[jsmithepa]

For the purpose of Disaster Recovery, so one can "Go-Back" to a known-to-be-good OS state (of course you can include data and other if you want to)...

I use Macrium, is free, it's full-featured but not too intimidating GUI. Makes a bootable recovery flash. Writes everything into one big file without asking for your whole HD.

 

[The Original Ralph]

I've used EaseUS ToDo Backup since 2008 (free ware version) and love it - for a complete clone i select "sector by sector" and have simply swapped the target HDD or SSD into the computer, but it will also let you make a boot disc to clone back to the original OS drive

The interface is super easy to follow

One part that i especially like, it actually creates the same directory tree in the clone, so that if you need to retrieve a single file etc, it's no different than searching the OS drive's directory or want to swap in an updated file to the clone drive without doing a complete backup, you can

fwiw

 

[Djard007]

Thanks to all for the valuable help. I will try them all, since I have Registrar Registry Manager and am able to quickly purge all the footprints from the registry after a so-called "uninstall." The EaseUS app sounds too good to be true. I can't wait to try it out and am downloading it now.

 

[The Original Ralph]

be sure to select "sector by sector" at the bottom of the 2nd page (where you select the target drive you're cloning to)

when i don't, programs like adobe photoshop and a couple of others require me to "re-activate" which is a pain - for whatever reason, sector by sector eliminates all that