HDClone Hard Drive Copier Review
Posted on March 19, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Reviews, Technology.
HDClone
Year: 2006
Version: V3.1 Basic
Author: Miray Software
Platform: Windows
Category: Utility
Publisher: Miray Software
Price: €19.90
My Acer 2026 laptop has very few features I don’t like. But one thing which has always annoyed me is the 4800 rpm Hard Drive. It really slowed down an otherwise speedy machine. Ages ago I bought a replacement 5400 rpm drive of the same capacity (80GB) from dabs.com. Not being a complete idiot, I also purchased two 2.5″ to 3.5″ disk cable adapters so I could plug both the old and new drives into a spare desktop and clone one to the other.
I have always used Maxtor MaxBlast to do this in the past but this time it had serious problems with the source disk and I never managed to do the cloning.
Recently I saw mention of HDClone on Lifehacker and they recommended it as a free solution to cloning hard drives. Last night I assembled a desktop from spare parts, put the two laptop hard drives in it, burned the HDClone Free Edition to CD and booted it up. All looked well and both disks were visible. But when I asked it to clone, it returned with a message saying that the free version only supports copying to a bigger disk, it would not handle same-sized disks and I would need to upgrade to HDClone Basic. Bum.
I went on to the site and realised it was only €19.90 for the Basic Version. Not much more than the bottle of wine I was drinking. I paid via paypal but was confused as to how I got my hands on the software. I mailed the support address and got a reply at midnight their time (Germany)! The mail with the code would automatically follow later. It was in my inbox this morning. Now that’s customer service.
I burned the bootable image to CD and started up the old desktop again. This time, I clicked a few “nexts” and off it went. About two hours later it was done. Worryingly it reported 17 read errors off the source disk but no write errors to the new disk. Maybe this is why MaxBlast had such problems before?
I decided to chance it and plugged the new harddrive into the laptop and all has been well for over an hour (I’m posting this on the laptop). I’ll basically try every piece of software installed on the laptop over the next few days to make sure those errrors had no effect. Obviously I still have the original if anything goes wrong.
In summary, an excellent piece of software which only loses one star because it does not provide a list of the locations of the read errors so I could follow them up. Highly recommended if you need to upgrade your hard drive and don’t have the time to re-install everything from scratch.
Tags: HDClone, Dabs, Acer 2026wlmi, MaxBlast, structuredblogging, LifeHacker
10 Replies to "HDClone Hard Drive Copier Review"
conor on January 26, 2007
Ten months later and the machine has run flawlessly every day. A great result for me.
Mike on January 27, 2007
Thanks for the reply. I tried *all* the other imaging backup apps and none would get the new drive to boot with a cloned/imaged O.S.
This HDclone did the trick. I ended up with 8 read errors. And at the end it said “erroneous clone”, but everything seems to work great, even after scadisk, several benchmarks, etc. It took a little over 4 hours to clone an 80 gig drive to a 320 gig drive. HDclone only showed the exact amount of gigs as the previous drive, so I had to use Partition Magic to find the rest of the drive space and either merge it to the C: drive or create a new partition(which is very easy and fast).
Not bad for a free app. I definitely plan to buy the faster version. I’m amazed it blew away all the other Image backup software I tried. It was also amazingly more simple than those apps.
conor on January 27, 2007
I was amazed by it too. I was happy to buy it and I’ve had free upgrades since. It’s one of those tools you don’t use very often, but when you need it, you really need it!
Thanks for posting the comment too. This post is in my top five most visited since I wrote it but this is the first comment anyone has written!
Mike on January 27, 2007
No problem. Thanks for making me aware of this product. It actually works like it is supposed to. Imagine that.
I will post any future updates on this cloned O.S. here.
Robert on September 27, 2008
Conor I sure appreciate your post.I have an old (6+years}P4 desktop that started making clicking sounds and simultaneously freezing up necessitating reboots.I checked on the net and came to the conclusion that my old HD was about to fail.I did my research about cloning and software and ended up buying not one but two different programs 1 w/hardware (Apricorn’s DriveWire) the other being Acronis.Both failed to clone my drive as they would stop at Read Errors.I came across your post and downloaded the free version of HDClone.It’s copying as I write this reply.It,so far,indicates 5 read and write errors but am hopeful in the end that the cloned drive will work.I will let you know.This has been a frustrating experience.Regards,Robert.
Conor O'Neill on September 27, 2008
I have a year old laptop that is suddenly given chkdsk errors on boot-up. I have a feeling I’ll be using HDClone very soon again.
Robert on September 28, 2008
Well Conor it didn’t work.Would you believe over 2700 Read & Write errors?I had run CHKDSK through DOS 2 times but what I didn’t know was that’s all it did,no repairs.Then I ran it w/windows and tried to clone again,no luck.Then after numerous reboots CHKDSK finally ran correctly identifying and fixing,it took it a long time to finish.I then used Acronis to clone my drive.It then worked without a glitch.Quite fast too.Anyway I’m surprized that w/all I’ve read on the net about cloning, not many mentions about doing disk repair.Initially I had only ran scandisk and defragged because that’s what was recommended.I wish someone would have mentioned CHKDSK.Although I should have known what with all the read errors.Using Arconis, O Errors! $30 0n EBay.Regards, Robert.
Conor O'Neill on September 28, 2008
Good point re repair. I lost 6 months of email a few years back because I couldn’t find decent tools that could fix/recover corrupted Linux software RIAD volumes.
flummoxed on October 9, 2008
Well, when your disks are really hurting that
bad, a run with SpinRite may be the only
Savior; it is certainly not OS dependent.
Mike on January 26, 2007
How did that clone work out? I have 8 read errors and three hours left on the cloning. I would be interested to know if you eventually ran into any problems.
Thanks.
-Mike