[Rolin]

I just purchased HDclone ver 4 Standard. So far I'm disappointed when using it. I've tried on 2 laptops so far.

1st laptop was a Sony Vaio with windows 7: 1st time failed with "copying bad sectors" and racked up as many bad sectors as copied sectors - appeared like every sector was bad. Stopped it and tried again with 1:1 smart sector off - this time it completed but took forever. But it wouldn't boot! I had to boot to a Win 7 ERD disc and perform a boot sector repair. Now the Sony laptop boots into windows, but the original Sony boot sector is no longer there - which means the Sony recovery options are gone since the boot sector has changed. Thats not acceptable.

2nd Laptop is a Dell Inspiron 1545 w/ Windows 7. Keep getting "copying bad sectors" - starts OK, but at some point (different point each time) it will start with the copying bad sectors on every sector.

So far this program just isn't working for me. Certainly not worth the $49US i paid.

Please give me some advice on what is going on with this program and what I can do to stop these errors. Otherwise I feel this program has too many bugs and would like to know how to obtain a refund.

Thank you

[Alex]

Before I can give any other suggestions: do these errors appear with HDClone for Windows, or with the variant you start from CD or USB flash drive? Both use different drivers, and sometimes it happens that the driver goes into a corrupt state from which it doesn't recover well.

If you are running the self-booting version, try using the Windows version, you can make a copy with it also from the system drive, since it uses a snapshot and therefore has a consistent result.

[Rolin]

Alex, thank you for your reply and sorry I didn't get back to you sooner.

I have been using a bootable CD made with the program. We clone hard drives often. In the past we used Norton Ghost (pre Vista), then for Vista we use EZ Gig software that comes with apricorn hard drive USB adapters. Sometimes we use Clonezilla. Really depends on which one will work on the hardware platform we're on. Some of these programs will work on Vista, some will work well with XP, some will work with a particular hard drive controller or usb ports, some won't. You get the idea - every machine is different. But our biggest issue right now is finding a good program to clone hard drives for Windows 7, and that's why I purchased HDClone 4 Standard from Miray.

We need to make sure this is a reliable method of cloning Windows 7 computers, or we will need to find another product.

To answer your question: we use the CD. We really don't want to install HDClone in Windows, then through windows create the clone. We just want to boot to a disk and clone the drive. Let me know if this rpoduct will work for our purposes. Based on the Sony we cloned with the damaged boot sector, it isn't looking too good. Most computers these days have a special boot sector that the recovery partition relys on. If that boot sector is damaged, the recovery won't work later.

Let me know what you think...