Hard Drive Imaging
 

Have a buddy who's 6 month old PC is showing signs of drive failure. He asked about getting it imaged over to a new drive. Is Norton Ghost or Acronis still the best software? Haven't had to do this for YEARS...

FTK Imager.

It's free and incredibly powerful but maybe not exactly user friendly for such a consumer related activity.

I use acronis. I heard there was a free version but I haven't seen it.

I used the image backup that comes with windows 7 recently to replace a failing HD...worked like a charm

I did the same. Worked much better than I expected.

how did it work, can you clone directly to the new drive and just swap them out?

I have also used EaseUS ToDo Backup. Very easy to use and 100% free.

I used Windows 7 backup & restore to backup data and create a system image to an external drive. Then I replaced drive. Booted with windows 7 disk and chose restore from system image. Took a little while but worked great.

The only thing I had to be sure of is that the HD I replaced the bad one with was the same size or larger. Mine was a 500GB drive so I just went with the same size.

It was flawless.