[Trent]

I copied an image (7 GB; created by HD Clone) onto my computer's IDE hard drive. I added a few files and now want to create another image.

HD Clone is reporting that I need over 230 GB to store this new image which is nowhere near correct. The total size of the hard drive is 250 GB.

Why is HD Clone reporting that I need so much hard drive space to store the new image?

[Alex]

It depends. If you use HDClone Free Edition or Basic Edition, the image will always be the size of the partition/disc you want to copy, regardless of the amount of data that is stored in the file system.

In your case though I think you should disable 'copy free areas' in the options, if you have a smaller partition on this disk, then only the size of the partition will be copied, not the unpartitioned area (i.e. if you take your 250GB drive, and have a 100GB partition on it, usually the image is 250GB in size, but if you deselect 'copy free areas', then the image is 100GB in size. If you use smartcopy (from Standard or Professional Edition), the image will be only as large as the used size of the 100GB partition. An almost empty partition will therefore be only a few hundred MB in size).

[Trent]

Thanks, Alex, for the response.

I am using HD Clone 3.7 Professional Edition. Where is the ability to disable "copy free areas" located?

Flow of operation:
1. Copy Mode == Drive to Image
2. Select hard drive as the Source. Press Next.
3. At this point, the required disk space is 235 GB.