Disk Cloneing

A friend broght me his Windows XP SP2 computer when the 20GB hard drive reached 1% free space left. He has obtained a new 160GB EIDE drive and I installed it as a primary slave drive. I want to copy the old drive to the new larger drive. I first decided to do some maintaince on the old drive. I ran disk cleanup, and error checking, but was unable to run disk defragmenter because it did not have 15% free space. I tried to use the Data Lifeguard software to copy the existing drive, but it failed, most likely because of the extreme fragmention. I tried Acronis True Image 10 and it also failed. I don't feel comfortable in deleting someone else's files and folders to gain the 2.85 GB of free space needed for the dframenter to run. I would like to do a bit by bit clone and defragment the new larger drive. Is this possible?

Symantec ghost may work on it!!!!

I wil try to get that software and try it tomorrow.

You need to buy it, its not free.


He needs to get rid of all the crap he knows he does not need or use, programs, games,etc...


Run defrag once you get to 15% or more, Since there is no point in copying over crap over to a new drive

A program can not fail because of disk fragmentation. There is something else wrong.

I was a little incorrect in my first post. I had ask and sent directions to my friend asking him to do the disk maintainance before I arrived. he assured me everything had been done except the defragmention, because of the 1% free space issue. I downloaded the free trial of Norton Ghost and installed it to find out that the disk cloning feture is only avaiable in the retail version. What a waste of time. I tried Acronis again and got disk errors. I went back and ran the error checking program and found lots of bad and orphaned sectors. Should of done this from the start. Cloned the new disk with no problems. Switched disk, ran disk defragmenter and removed a ton of spywear. I am going to buy the full retail version of Acronis True Image 10 Home.