OT: cloning or imaging a new hard drive

[Kenneth Brody]

On 10/3/2012 9:32 AM, Richard Kreiss wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: filepro-list-bounces+rkreiss=verizon.net at lists.celestial.com
>> [mailto:filepro-list-bounces+rkreiss=verizon.net at lists.celestial.com] On
>> Behalf Of Laura Brody
[...]
>> Quoting GCC Consulting <rkreiss at gccconsulting.net>:
>>
>>> I am considering installing a SSD as a replacement for my current hard
>>> drive in my laptop.
>>>
>>> Two products that come to mind are Symantec's Ghost and Acronis' True
>> image.
>>>
>>
>> I use Clonezilla. It is a freebee and I am not intimated by Linux, so it
> is my "go
>> to" utility to clone hard drives. Do you have cables to put a USB
> connection to
>> a naked hard drive? If not, you can get them for less than $20 from eBay.
[...]
>
> Thanks for the suggestion.
>
> Will check this out.  However, the laptop OS is Windows7 Pro.

While clonezilla is Linux-based(*), it supports many filesystems:

http://clonezilla.org/

=====
Filesystem supported: (1) ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs, reiser4, xfs, jfs, 
btrfs of GNU/Linux, (2) FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS of MS Windows, (3) HFS+ of 
Mac OS, (4) UFS of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, and (5) VMFS3 and VMFS5 of 
VMWare ESX. Therefore you can clone GNU/Linux, MS windows, Intel-based Mac 
OS, and FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, no matter it's 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit 
(x86-64) OS. For these file systems, only used blocks in partition are saved 
and restored. For unsupported file system, sector-to-sector copy is done by 
dd in Clonezilla.
=====

(*) No pretty eye candy UI.  No "mousy-mousy-click-click".  Just text and 
the keyboard.  Well, it does support mouse input in text mode for making 
menu choices.

-- 
Kenneth Brody