I imagine there are more than a few on this board that have done this. My hard drive has been getting a little noisy (not the fan) and it is a 5 year 100 Gig unit. I want to upgrade to a 500 Gig drive and would like it to be seamless.
I am planning to contact a repair shop tomorrow to have this done; however, I was wondering about your experience. Does it really work? By that, I mean, all programs from Microsoft Office through AutoCad and everything in between will run without fail. No need to reload or re-register anything. No drivers, patches, etc. I'm hoping when I pick up the computer, I won't notice any difference at all. What say you?
If there will be a lot of time and trouble to install everything; then I would probably just get a new one and upgrade everything now. Although work has picked up quite a bit, I would rather wait about six months when I should have a little more cash to spare.
Gary
During at least several generations of Autocad I have had to reauthorize it when moving it to a new drive. This has been true for several other applications as well. It seemed to me it was somehow tied to some signature on the drive.
The effort was minimal to do however if you have all the proper licenses and codes.
This may no longer be so for Autocad products in the last few years which may key on the CPU. Anyway I would expect issues like that to occur.
- jlw
"Clone" is the operative word, it caries all that computer "DNA" stuff.
I keep a clone drive most of the time.
I have used the instructions in the following article a couple of times, and it works very well. A 500 gig laptop drive takes a couple hours. (a dual boot drive with Windows 7 and Ubuntu)
Gary,
You may want to do a search for "Ghosting a PC/computer".
About 6 months ago my home PC picked up a very strange virus / malware that even our IT guy at work couldn't figure out and I don't visit sketchy or illicit sites. He even kept my PC for 3 days and figured a work around but it was still there.
Anyway, he reformatted my PC and reloaded every program that I had or needed, including the OS, ACAD, Office and the like. I then bought a Western Digital 320Gb external hard drive and had him ghost it to my PC. According to him, it is a snapshot of the PC at that time.
The Ext HD has a built in program that whenever I plug it in and run a routine, it will look in certain folders that I assign and back up ONLY those files. Pictures and stuff essentially.
I then unplug it and put it back into our fireproof safe.
My IT guy also recommends that I reformat my PC once a year and with this HD that is how I will do it. Scrub it clean, plug in the Ext HD and it "drops" everything right back into place from the last back up.
Rob
A little late to reply,
but I just recently did this with 3 PCs. I was starting to run low on space in two of them and wanted a back-up of all software as installed for the third one.
Went to the nearby Best Buy and picked up some Seagate drives that came with software for cloning, back-up, etc..
1.5TB for around 80 bucks.
Very easy to install new drive, software, and clone.
I then unplugged old drive to make sure PC booted from clone and everything worked just fine.
All software functioned as installed.
Here is the only down side to this easy manner of doing it - if you have the clone and then make enough hardware changes - the cloned drive will need new authorization for Windows. There is supposed to be a way around this, but I haven't read up on it.
Definitely a good idea for peace of mind about having a complete back-up.
Jon Payne
