Drive copying app?

[Pot Bellied Fool]

'Lo All

Anyone got a recommendation for an application (free would be even better) that I can use to clone a hard drive.

I've got Partition Magic hanging around somewhere but that runs (afaik) from within the OS. I want to be able to do it by booting from a CD or floppy.

My old copy of 'Drive Copy 4' has long since been superceded & it seems to be prone to errors with some newer drives so looking for an alternative.

I want to be able to do it from outside the OS as a typical application for me is backing up a customer's failing drive (that hasn't quite yet lost all integrity but is error correcting like mad) to clone it onto a new drive.

Cheers - PBF

[MeLLoN Stu]

i'm told by a nosy friend who is (annoyingly) reading over my shoulder that driveclone should be about what you're looking for. Not sure if norton ghost has that capability, probably.

www.farstone.com/software/driveclone.htm

[Zod]

Acronis True Image has never let me down.

[SneakyNeil]

Norton Ghosts changed a bit since the copy I'm using (8.something corporate) but that runs from dos, and has a wizzard to create network boot disks/CD's etc. to save faffing around taking the drives out getting dust everywhere. Has options to continue over bad sectors. You can also mount a saved image as a drive on an XP machine, even share it out on't network like. Symantec Gost Solutions Suite looks like the closest currently on their website.

Have also used a boot disk & the linux 'dd' command a bit to save drive images, but this is 100% uuber-dumb byte by byte copying and won't resize any partitions for you. A neat trick though is that you can even undelete files etc. from a dd copied target disk (that were deleted from the source disk)

Google 'barts PE' for more cool stuff for working with peoples drives offline.