Clone system disk

[Airbase]

There must be some Ableton users around here that did this if it's possible, so maybe you can help me out.

My DAW has a 250Gb system disk, and it's now close to full. I've cleaned away as much as possible the last few months, but now there's nothing more I can remove. So I need a new disk. I've placed an order for three 1TB drives, and one of them will replace my system disk.

My system is Windows XP, and it's rock solid right now, and I'd hate to reinstall all of it from scratch. Is there a way to clone the drive to a new one and then replace the old one with the new one with little or no hassle?

So, anyone have any suggestions, tips, pointers or input of any kind?

// Jezper

[Imaulle]

Hi Jezper I love you!

run ghost, make an image of the system, then use sysprep on the new harddrive

[Imaulle]

or, you can go to the website for the manufacuter of the HD and use their free utility to copy your existing windows parition to the new drive. WD has "Data Lifeguard Tools" and not sure what the other company's have but they have something similiar...

then you just run the program, it will ask which system partition you want to copy, and then where you want to copy it to, then you just swap the drives and you are good to go

[pieter]

i'm in the same situation and i'm about to clone my mac system drive to a bigger drive.
i already found carbon copy clone - but i think that's mac only.

[ekwipt]

Free: http://www.karenware.com/powertools/ptreplicator.asp

Paid:

http://www.acronis.com.au/
http://www.oo-software.com/home/en/prod ... diskimage/
http://www.paragon-software.com/home/db-personal/

[Airbase]

Thanks a lot guys. Hearing Acronis being mentioned a lot when googling. But I'll check all the alternatives out.

[m:o]

I swear on R-Drive Image
there are so many programs and all i can say is that this never let me down.
http://www.drive-image.com/

[sven303]

Ive been using active disk image

http://www.disk-image.net

How do you manage to fill up a 250gb disk anyway?
I have 2x100gb disks....
1 for OS which currently with everything installed is still only using 21.5gb
2 for data/samples etc which is using 76.7gb and i reckon if i deleted the porn would bring that down to about 50gb...lol

[Cowlash]

Thanks a lot guys. Hearing Acronis being mentioned a lot when googling. But I'll check all the alternatives out.

+1 for Acronis, I've used it quite a few times and it does a great job - easy to use too

[arachnaut]

I've used Acronis, too, to do this same thing.
It's pretty good, but sometimes there are reports of troubles using it.

[poodleface]

My system is Windows XP, and it's rock solid right now, and I'd hate to reinstall all of it from scratch. Is there a way to clone the drive to a new one and then replace the old one with the new one with little or no hassle?

Bear in mind that when you change the size of your system disk this usually will require you to reauthorize Live (I don't know if this has changed with Live 8, but I know that when I tried to restore my system in OSX to a larger drive it required me to reauthorize Live 7).

For Windows, I've never had issues with Acronis. As long as you keep your old disk around there isn't a huge cost other than time when trying to move your system to another disk... if one solution doesn't work you can always swap disks and re-image.

I'm with sven though, what do you have on your system drive to fill 250gb?

If you have sample libraries it would be much better for your performance if you migrated them to another disk. It's almost always better to have a smaller disk as your C drive and try to keep as much non-essential stuff off of it as possible. If you put your main system drive on a large disk, you will likely see degrading performance since the drive head has to scan a lot more data when executing programs and such.

I tend to keep all of my project data on one drive (backed up of course) and my sample libraries on another drive, with my main drive being one of those 10,000 rpm jobs from WD.

[abletoff]

Bear in mind that when you change the size of your system disk this usually will require you to reauthorize Live (I don't know if this has changed with Live 8, but I know that when I tried to restore my system in OSX to a larger drive it required me to reauthorize Live 7).

This is really important... If i clone my system disk to a new drive and then boot from that, do I have to unlock again?

[arachnaut]

This is really important... If i clone my system disk to a new drive and then boot from that, do I have to unlock again?

Yes, at least I had to do that.

If you want to try something - write down the volume serial number where Live is installed.
Then after cloning, copy that number to the new drive.
I don't think you can have two drives with the same serial number, so you'll have to remove the older drive.

I don't know if that would work, but it might.

You'll need VolumeId from sysinternals to do that:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysi ... 97436.aspx

[abletoff]

Great tip arachnaut, I'll try

[arachnaut]

Let us know if it works or not.