[pdr]

I would like to use the HD Clone Professional Edition, to clone the data currently on my Drive C:, to my Drive F:. Drive C: is my boot-up drive, containing Win XP, and all Program Files. It contains very little data.

Drive E: is my Data Drive. It contains all the data produced by the programs on Drive C: I cannot take a chance of losing all that.

I would like to be able to have a part of Drive E: used as a badkup for Drive C:, so that I could restore the Drive C: in the case of a crash.

The drives are both IDE drives, and are can be described is as follows:

Drive C: is 80 GB, and is using 15 GB of space.

Drive F: is 160 GB, and is using 84.9 GB of space, leaving 64.1 GB of free space.

From my understanding, to clone Drive C to Drive F will result in obliterating all the date currently on Drive F: and replacing it with the data that is currently on Drive C:. This will be the case, even though Drive C: has only 15 GB of data.

So, perhaps, I can use Partition to Partition, and clone only the 15 GB of data to a Partition on Drive F:, so that I still can retain the data currently on F:, and add to it the partition containing the C: date.

However, when I choose that option, I still get the warning that the Data on Drive F: will be overwritten.

On the HD Clone site, description of the program says, "it offers technicians, professional and private users highest possible speed and flexibility through its 'FastCopy' mode and the 'Sector area' option which allows you to define an arbitrary copying area on the medium."

Questions:

1. Given that the data on the target Drive will be overwritten in both cases, what is the difference between Drive --> Drive cloning, and Partition --> Partition?
2. Is it possible to retain any data on the Target Drive?
3. If so, how does one do that?
4. If you wish to use the "Sector Area" Option, how does one "define an arbitrary copying area on the medium?"
5. Having defined such an "arbitrary area", how would I know that that area was, in fact, available, and without data I would wish to keep?

I would appreciate an answer, as I cannot take the risk of destroying my F: drive.

Thanks in advance for any comments.

Peter

[Alex]

Ok, I'll go number for number:

1) Drive to Drive copies every sector from 0 to maxsector, whilst Partition to Partition copies every sector starting from the startsector of the partition to the startsector of the target partition onward, to whichever end comes first.

2) Say you use partition->partition, other partitions on the target drive won't be affected at all.

3) see 2)

4) If you know that your disk data from C: e.g. lies between sectors 63 to sector 1048576, you can enter this values. This of course needs a very intimate knowledge of your source partition.

5) using products such as DiskSpy, one could verify that the area is indeed unused (though this is a rather laboursome task to do).

My understanding is that your C: drive is a 80GB-Partition filled with 15GB, i.e. 18%. Your best option would be to resize this partition to below 64GB and resize your F:-Partition also to allow for an extra partition to take up this 64GB.

Look forward to a newer version of HDClone where only the used parts of the partition will be copied, so your C:-Partition will only take 15GB (or less, when compression comes into play). Saving *into* F: as a File (thus not altering the other contents of F: is still another thing and not yet on my horizon as to when this will be available.